Communications Technology

Defence investigated about 250 ‘’serious, sophisticated” cyber intrusions into government networks in the first eight months of the year, and the threat is so severe the department is considering designating cyberspace as a fifth domain of warfare.

The admission comes weeks after a US defence bureaucrat warned that the frequency and sophistication of cyber intrusions were increasing ”exponentially”.

”In the first eight months of this year, approximately 1000 cyber incidents affecting government networks were reported,” a Defence spokesman said.

A quarter of those incidents - about 250 - were so serious they warranted investigation by Defence’s new Cyber Security Operations Command. Those figures represent a rise on figures from previous years, the spokesman said.

There were as many as 2400 other attempted intrusions last year, according to the former defence minister John Faulkner, who made the statement during the launch of the command in January.

The Attorney-General, Robert McClelland, said this week: ”It’s very difficult to identify the source of attacks; often they can be routed through other countries or other players.”

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Tasmania is set to become the next Silicon Valley-style technology hub if the national broadband network goes ahead, says its Premier.

He’s the 43rd Premier of Tasmania and an “obsessive gadget nerd” who’s “got to have all the best gadgets going around”.

David Bartlett, 42, is probably Australia’s geekiest Premier. South Australian Premier Mike Rann “would come a close second”, he says in an interview with this website.

Bartlett owns an Apple iPad, an iPhone 4 and a MacBook Air - all of which he says he uses for both work and play.

“My iPhone 4 is indispensable,” he says. “My iPad is … just such a killer application as far as I’m concerned. It’s the thing that transforms everything I do in terms of consumption of media and organising my day and doing my emails. I haven’t used a laptop or hardly a desktop [computer] since I got my iPad.”

Bartlett has also been granted one of the greatest gifts he could ever have wished for - his is the first Australian state to get access to the federal government’s national broadband network.

He says there is “massive economic opportunity” in the rollout.

“In the past 50 or 60 years, the island’s been really fuelled in economic direction by hydro-industrialisation; that is renewable energy and what that brought to Tasmania. And [with] the [national broadband network], or the rollout of optic fibre, by 2013 Tasmania will be the most connected place on the planet when it comes to penetration of fibre-to-the-premises.”

Bartlett says he sees the national broadband network as “the new wave of hydro-industrialisation, or as important to Tasmania’s next three decades as hydro-industrialisation was for the previous three decades”.

He also believes the Apple isle, once fully connected to the network, will become attractive to IT giants such as Google, which are always looking for places to put more computer servers.

“We know for example that Google and other companies look for renewable energy sources when they’re placing their server farms because they want to be seen as clean, green companies,” the Premier says.

“And of course Tasmania produces some 75 per cent of Australia’s renewable energy right now and we have renewable energy that, again, fuelled the island for the past 50 years and will continue to do so because it’ll attract other industries that are related to information industries.”

Asked if he thought there was a responsibility for politicians to not be ignorant of technology, he said that there was.

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The Virgin Blue check-in system that crashed and left tens of thousands of passengers stranded was meant to be backed up by a parallel ”disaster recovery system” within three hours, but it did not work for 21 hours.

When a hardware failure crippled the system at 8am on Sunday, it created a cascading crisis: the airline was forced into manual operations; 400 flights and almost 50,000 passengers were disrupted; 113 services were cancelled. At least 18 more flights were cancelled yesterday as Virgin Blue dealt with the backlog of angry passengers.

Since June, Virgin Blue has been using a check-in and reservation system provided by Navitaire, a subsidiary of the American firm Accenture.

Navitaire has a recovery system on a separate server, Virgin Blue’s group executive of operations, Andrew David, said yesterday.

”That system was supposed to come up within about three hours,” Mr David said. ”But it wasn’t until 5 o’clock this morning - 21 hours later - that we got the back-up system up and running.”

The Herald understands Navitaire told Virgin Blue on Sunday morning that the back-up would be working within the three hours, then made assurances throughout the day.

The airline put up about 1000 passengers in hotels on Sunday night. It moved almost 50,000 passengers yesterday and by late in the day the backlog was down to about 6000, most of whom were to be put on flights last night. Some spent a second night in hotels before the last - ”in the tens, not the hundreds” - were to be cleared today.

All passengers would be reimbursed for taxis and accommodation worth up to $220 a night. They would be offered a free flight as compensation. ”Clearly, we will be looking for compensation [from Navitaire],” Mr David said, ”but our focus now has been on our guests.”

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