In this instalment of RB2 we'll be hearing from Australian Federal Police Assistant Commissioner Neil Gaughan, who heads up High Tech and Child Protection Operations, for the AFP.

A recent report in the Sydney Morning Herald detailed changes to Australian law that would allow the Australian Federal Police to physically destroy computers if they contain encrypted data the police can't unlock.

The story also talked about further changes to laws that would stiffen penalties for suspects who refuse to hand over encryption keys and passwords.

Anyway, it all sounded pretty extreme and drew a pretty adverse reaction from Adam Boileau, our regular news guest on the Risky Business podcast, so I thought I'd get Neil on the line and ask him about these changes, instead of just assuming the worst.

Neil joined me by phone on Monday for this interview!

In this sponsored podcast, Symantec's VP of security response joins RB2 to talk about some novel new approaches to the malware problem.

We don't normally talk to sponsors about their own technology, but this is just where the conversation went, and it's pretty interesting stuff!

Symantec's vision for the future is to gauge the level of risk posed to systems by building up a database that ranks executables according to their reputation. It's sort of like eBay's system of ranking buyers and sellers. I'd heard of this approach a while ago, but Vincent drills down into a bit of detail here. It's good stuff.