Australia experiences ‘significant cyber security incident’ at several ports

The Australian government declared Saturday November 11 a cyber security incident “Important” Several ports in the country, operated by DP World Australia Group, were affected. The government is coordinating the responses “Significant cyber security incident affecting several Australian ports” and cooperates with the operator “Measure Impact”said the Australian Home Affairs Minister Clare O’Neill At X (formerly Twitter).

The Australian Cyber ​​Security Center advises the port operator “Provides technical assistance”National Cyber ​​Security Coordinator Darren Goldie explained “The disruption will continue for several days and will affect the movement of goods in and out of the country.”.

According to Bloomberg, the Australian executive called a crisis meeting on Saturday to coordinate its response to the hack, which was discovered on Friday and led to DP World limiting access to Australia’s four major ports. Mr Goldie said the agencies would meet again on Sunday and work with the company.

Port closures in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Fremantle threaten to cripple supply chains that have yet to fully recover from the effects of the pandemic. The disruption comes at a time when DP World’s operations have already been hit by an ongoing strike by the Maritime Union of Australia over wages and better working conditions.

Repeated attacks

Darren Goldie said the Australian Federal Police had launched an investigation. The coordinator, a former Australian Air Force officer, was appointed last July in response to a number of cyber attacks in the country.

A year ago, the personal information of over nine million customers of Optus, one of Australia’s largest telecommunications providers, was stolen in a cyber attack. Last week, the same operator suffered a massive outage, the causes of which are yet to be explained.