Forget cyber attacks from overseas agents.
It transpires that much of Australia's infrastructure is dependent on
a single global content delivery network (CDN) company headquartered
in Cambridge, Massachusetts, named
Akamai.
Yesterday, not a cyber attack, but a routing table entry error in a computer
at Akamai took offline many of the services of three of the four big
Australian Banks, Virgin Australia, American, Southwest, United and Delta
Airlines in the US, the Hong Kong Stock Exchange, Australia Post and
hundreds of other corporations and government agencies around the world.
Disturbingly, someone in government had decided it was a real good idea
to entrust the computing services of Australia's central bank - the Reserve
Bank of Australia - to a private company in Massachusetts.
There was a scheduled buying of Australian Government Bonds by the
Reserve Bank (aka printing money with your own IOU), that had to
be cancelled due to the Akamai outage.
On Wednesday afternoon, Australia Post was unable to accept international
parcel deliveries and yesterday, Thursday afternoon, they were unable
to process both international and domestic parcel shipments. I stood in
the post office looking at the growing piles of boxes sitting idle. A woman
behind me said, "I've just come from a petrol station. It is chaos. People
can't pay".
It certainly is a major wake-up call that so much Australian infrastructure
is dependent on the minute-by-minute reliability of a single private US
corporation, let alone any dependency whatsoever by the likes of
the Reserve Bank of Australia.
Story here :-
https://fortune.com/2021/06/17/yet-m...cdn-ceo-daily/
https://www.reuters.com/world/asia-p...rs-2021-06-17/
Some technical background :-
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/major...go-down-566080
https://www.itnews.com.au/news/akama...outages-566103