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Ten mistakes marred firewall upgrade at Australian telco (www.theregister.com)
submitted 10 months ago by to c/australia@aussie.zone
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Technicians working on a firewall upgrade made at least ten mistakes, contributing to two deaths, according to a report on a September incident that saw Australian telco Optus unable to route calls to emergency services.

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[–] -4 points 10 months ago (9 children)

If null references are a billion dollar mistake, firewalls are a trillion dollar mistake. It is a tool of oppression by despots. Each route needing an offering of fealty for passage.

I am not exaggerating when it has taken 6 months to get some simple firewall rules updated to activate a new internal service. Blew my mind! Some of these system admins are nuts with how much everything is locked down, complete masochists watching people struggling to get software to communicate over the network they control.

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  • [–] [S] 6 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    They are managing weapon of mass destruction. Security must be paranoid there. But it seems there are too many managers and not enough engineers if they use traffic volumes to monitor network heath. And I bet it will be some poor engineer who going to be blamed for the fault. Not faulty procedures created by other people.

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  • [–] 1 point 10 months ago (2 children)

    They are managing weapon of mass destruction.

    Then Albo needs to get the ADF to drone strike sysadmins who block icmp. Make the world great again!

    And I bet it will be some poor engineer who going to be blamed for the fault.

    Australia has fairly decent democratic system. If plebs are tired of being blamed then they should stop voting for corporate boot licking politicians.

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  • [–] [S] 3 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    I'm not joking about "mass destruction". If adversary take control and bringing down telco of size of Optus will cause massive damage. Strict policies there are for reason.
    Australia democracy ends where corp start. There is no democracy inside any corp. Just dictatorship of different level malevolency.

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  • [–] 3 points 10 months ago

    The government needs to exercise Eminent Domain over all critical infrastructure.

    • Telecommunication
    • Water
    • Energy.

    The damage of Jeff Kennett and John Howard can be reversed.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (4 children)

    My god man, you have no idea what you are talking about.

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  • [–] -1 points 10 months ago (3 children)

    I know exactly want I am talking about. What happened to Optus happens to me all the time when developing custom software for Australian businesses. Sys-admin is all outsourced to a huge Indian conglomerates who have no clear idea about the scope of the network and no incentive to know it. Consistently claim a ticket is completed when it has not been and repeat 5-6 times before they blame the software, repeat until I have a full Phd thesis of evidence demonstrating it is a sys-admin issue.

    In the end it is all security theater because I write the software and could screw up the whole business if I wanted to be malicious.

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  • [–] 4 points 10 months ago (2 children)

    because I write the software and could screw up the whole business if I wanted to be malicious.

    Which is why there is the general rule of zero trust in networks. You start with nothing and you need to prove why you need a hole poked in the firewall. Some IT departments are better at actioning those requests than others. You clearly have had the joy of working with IT departments that are on the worse end of the scale.

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  • [–] -1 points 10 months ago (1 child)

    Which is why there is the general rule of zero trust in networks.

    Exactly. Hence I started with the trillion dollar mistake comment, it costs a truck load of money to get any changes for development with no security benefit in this context. I could feed businesses bad data and no network dictatorship can stop that.

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