The infrastructures concerned are those operated by DP World, a group which manages nearly 40% of goods entering and leaving Australia.
Several Australian ports operated by the company DP World remain blocked on Sunday, November 12, due to a major cybersecurity incident. This one is always “in progress”wrote Clare O’Neil, Australian Minister of the Interior, on the social network. “DP World manages nearly 40% of goods entering and leaving our country”, she added, while the government holds crisis meetings to try to find a solution. So far, the latter has not attributed this outage to a cyberattack. The Australian Federal Police have opened an investigation.
Port operator DP World had to interrupt the internet connection at its terminals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Fremantle on Friday to prevent “any unauthorized access” to its network, a company spokesperson said. Containers can be unloaded from ships, but the trucks needed to transport them cannot enter or leave terminals, said Blake Tierney, DP World’s Asia Pacific business director.
A disruption for “several days”
The group says it has made “significant progress” by collaborating with cybersecurity experts and testing systems “crucial for the resumption of the regular movement of goods”. The group is simultaneously investigating the impact of the incident. Disruption of port operations “should probably last several days, rather than several weeks”according to information provided by the group to the government, said national cybersecurity coordinator Darren Goldie.
Cybersecurity experts point out that Australia is not sufficiently protected against computer attacks and that there are vulnerable consumer databases that make the country a lucrative target for hackers.
Medibank, Australia’s largest private insurer, admitted in November 2022 that hackers had accessed the data of 9.7 million current and former customers, including their medical records. Two months earlier, more than 9 million customers of Optus, one of Australia’s largest telecommunications providers, had their personal data stolen in a cyberattack. Last week, the same operator was the victim of a giant outage with still unexplained causes, which affected some 10 million customers.