The main Australian ports, which represent 40% of the country’s freight volume, have resumed their activities, announced Monday the largest port operator DP World, victim of a cyberattack last week, as highlighted by our partner, Les Nouvelles calédoniennes .
DP World had cut internet access following a computer attack on Friday, preventing trucks from unloading or loading goods at the ports of Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Fremantle. “DP World Australia is pleased to announce that operations have resumed at (the company’s) managed ports in Australia,” the company said in a statement.
The main systems were successfully tested overnight from Sunday to Monday. Some 5,000 containers will leave the four terminals during the day, a figure close to the usual daily traffic, she estimated.
Getting containers out
The investigation and efforts to protect systems could, however, result in “some necessary and temporary disruption” to port services over the coming days, the company said.
DP World said its investigation and remediation work was likely to take “some time”. Shipping companies said operations at ports resumed slowly early in the morning, with the priority being getting containers out of terminals. According to Alastair MacGibbon, cyber attack advisor at DP World, there was “unauthorized activity in the system”. The data was stolen by “someone malicious or unauthorized ,” he told the Nine Network television channel, without specifying the nature of the stolen data.
Since the attack, trucks have been unable to unload or load goods at these four ports.
Origin unknown
The Australian coordinator in charge of cybersecurity, Darren Goldie, said Monday that the origin of this cyberattack is not known. Medibank, Australia’s largest private medical insurance provider, announced in November 2022 that the data of 9.7 million current and former customers had been hacked. Just over a year ago, more than nine million customers of Optus, one of Australia’s largest telecommunications providers, had their personal data stolen in a cyberattack.
These two incidents are among the largest data breaches in Australian history. Last week, Optus was the victim of a giant outage for several hours with still unexplained causes. He apologized to his more than ten million users.