Australian Strategic Policy Institute cyber, technology and security director Alex Caples says it’s “fairly clear” that the Optus outage wasn’t caused by a cyberattack.
Speaking on ABC radio this morning, she said it seemed unlikely that was the cause behind the massive outage which left millions unable to use their mobiles or connect to the internet.
“It does seem fairly clear that it wasn’t a cyberattack,” Dr Caples said on RN Breakfast.
Optus outage is still causing issues for the company.Credit: Louie Douvis
“It seems likely that it was a misconfiguration of a gateway protocol of essentially a BGP [Border Gateway Protocol] routers during a scheduled update. And basically that means part of the Optus network was giving incorrect information during an update which led to an outage, but we know very little more than that.”
She said it was hard to say whether Optus knew more than that.
“Optus communications at least publicly have been pretty minimal … the CEO has copped a little bit of flack for that but I do think they need to investigate the details and to understand just how such a significant outage could occur in Australia’s second large telecommunications service.”
The expert said the scale of the outage was “really quite alarming” and showed the real-world implications, such as hitting train networks.