Telstra outage exposes fragile critical infrastructure

The West Australian

Jul 08

A crippling outage that caused nationwide disruptions to transport networks, business, emergency services and healthcare has exposed the vulnerability of Australia’s critical infrastructure to ...

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Credit: NewsWire“(Wednesday’s) outage shows that the question is no longer whether Australians can make phone calls, but whether the economy can function when a single network fails,” he said.“Within hours, Victoria’s regional rail network was suspended, payment terminals serving roughly 80,000 businesses were disrupted, and taxi passengers were left unable to pay their fares.“None of this required a cyberattack. It required a single technical fault at one carrier.”The lesson for policymakers, he said, was that mobile connectivity is crucial economic infrastructure and must be regulated as such.Telstra said potential triple-zero call problems were more widespread than previously thought, requiring hundreds of welfare checks.‘Great risk’Telecommunications expert and RMIT Associate Professor Mark Gregory said the telecommunications legislation was written in the 90s and did not reflect the modern, digital world.“We’ve got a structural problem with systemic failures built into it,” he told AAP.“The legislation needs to be rebuilt structurally from the ground up and brought into tune with the modern era and it needs to be focused around the customer.”La Trobe University Professor Daswin De Silva said the Security of Critical Infrastructure Act 2018 - which covers telecom providers as one of 11 critical infrastructure sectors - needed further government oversight and accountability measures.“Telecommunications is one of our critical infrastructure sectors that has systemic impact across the economy, society and national security, including emergency services and healthcare, to banking and transport networks,” he said.Although Telstra chief financial officer Michael Ackland unequivocally denied the outage could have been the result of a cyberattack, cybersecurity expert Dennis Desmond said the incident exposed the vulnerability of critical infrastructure.“Whether due to adversarial attack, internal equipment failures, or patches and upgrades to firmware or software, our reliance on our critical infrastructure places Australian citizens and the services they receive at great risk,” he said.“If attributed to nefarious actors rather than internal errors or failures, the long-term effects could be much more severe than we experience with temporary outages.”Investigations into the underlying cause of Telstra’s software glitch are ongoing. analysis analysisPoliticsVideoComments analysisTelstra’s outage sparks China fears, public relations battleTom Richardson updated updatedNewsVideoComments updatedUrgent probe underway as Telstra 000 outage fallout growsMadeline Cove and Emily Williams","kind":"highlight","is_publish_news":true,"is_publish_highlight":false,"is_publish_live":false,"is_publish_wemedia":false,"editions":null,"column":"","sentiment":"0","news_tag":"","news_rank":0,"isVideo":false,"video":null,"symbols":[],"gpt_button":0,"need_auth":false,"need_login_tip":false,"code":"91000000","status":"200"}}}