Further emergency meetings will be held to examine the fallout of a global IT outage in Australia.
Banks, airports, supermarkets, media companies and retailers were left scrambling following Friday’s outage, which was caused by major cyber security firm CrowdStrike deploying a software update.
The National Co-ordination Mechanism – made up of government agencies and representatives from affected sectors – will meet again on Sunday morning to discuss future steps following the outage.
Assistant Energy Minister Jenny McAllister said work was ongoing between the government and sectors hit by the outage to ensure they were back up and running.
“We are still in recovery stage … there is still more work to do to make sure that the residual issues arising from this outage are able to be addressed,” she told Sky News on Sunday.
“There will be opportunity in time to reflect on what’s occurred over the last couple of days, whether it exposes vulnerabilities that we are able to address.
“The key thing at the moment, and the focus for the government, is restoring services.”
Most companies affected by the outage were operational again by Saturday.
Shadow Treasurer Angus Taylor said the incident had reinforced the concerns of having large amounts of internet systems in the hands of a few firms.
“It’s also very clear that government and businesses have got to get smarter and better at being able to deal with these situations,” he told Sky News.
“That might mean having redundancy, it might mean ensuring that you’ve got alternatives, it certainly might mean not having one organisation or one company with too much market share.”
The widespread outages had led to concerns scammers would use the incident to target Australians with malicious texts and emails to gain personal details.
Senator McAllister urged internet users to be extremely cautious in handing over information online following the outage.
“There are obviously some actors out there trying to take advantage of this situation, and we are urging Australians to be incredibly careful at this point in time,” she said.
“People should think very carefully before providing any information, any personal information at all to anybody requesting it. Think about whether this makes sense. If you are in any way uncertain, just stop.”
By Andrew Brown in Canberra
