One of Australia’s largest port operators has resumed its operations after a cyberattack forced it to suspend operations for three days.
The breach crippled operations at DP World Australia, which manages around 40% of goods flowing in and out of the country, and affected its container terminals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Western Australia’s Fremantle.
“Operations resumed at the company’s ports across Australia at 9am today (2200 GMT, Sunday)… following successful tests of key systems overnight,” the company, part of Dubai’s state-owned DP World, said in a statement.
DP World said it expected to move about 5,000 containers from the four Australian terminals through the day, though ongoing investigations and responses to protect its networks could result in temporary disruptions over the next few days.
“This is a part of an investigation process and resuming normal logistical operations at this scale,” DP World said.
After discovering the breach on Friday, DP World disconnected its ports from the internet, significantly impacting freight movements.
It did not specify whether it had received any ransomware demands.
Australia has seen a rise in cyber intrusions since late last year, which prompted the government in February to reform its rules and set up an agency to help coordinate responses to hacks.
“(The DP World breach) does show how vulnerable we have been in this country to cyber incidents and how much better we need to work together to make sure we keep our citizens safe,” cyber security minister Clare O’Neil told ABC Radio.
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The breach came as the government released new details of its proposed cyber security laws on Monday, which would force companies to report all ransomware incidents, demands or payments.
Ms O’Neil said the rules would also bring telecommunication companies under “strict cyber requirements”, after an outage last week at telco Optus cut off internet and phone connections to nearly half of Australia’s population for around 12 hours.
