A " Suspicious " Incident !

 Last Friday, Australia got an object lesson on how vulnerable we are to the world of electronics that rules every aspect of our daily lives. The eight hundred Coles grocery supermarkets scattered throughout every state were forced to close their doors and cease trading.  This interruption lasted much more than an hour and we are told that an unexpected electronic  glitch shut down the cash register operations and made trading impossible.

Customers doing their weekly shopping were told to leave their loaded trolleys where they stood - and leave the shop. There would have been a rush of all available staff to recover perishables from those trolleys and return them to their refrigerated display cases and later this recovery would have spread to the other items being returned to the shelves.

Every item on those shelves is identified by a bar code and when the selected groceries are presented at the checkout a scanner " reads " the code and adds it to the bill.  The customer then taps the register with an item of personal ID and the computer moves the required amount of money from the customer's bank account to that of the supermarket.

In one form or another, this is the protocol that now governs the way we live, from putting petrol in our cars to paying the electric light bill. The payment method is increasingly electronic and we are gradually changing from having actual money in our pockets to paying for small change items - like a newspaper or a cup of coffee - with a swipe of our mobile phones.

Unfortunately, this aspect of modern living presents an opportunity for an unfriendly nation to disrupt our economy by way of an undeclared war, and sophisticated criminals see electronic disruption as a way of making profit from distortion.  It is very hard to pin down the actual site from which interference with our computer network originates.  Hackers elsewhere in the world can damage our system and leave no trace. We are unlikely to ever learn if that Coles outage was industrial sabotage, or a natural malfunction because such matters are a closely governed government to government secret.

The relationship between Canberra and Beijing is presently strained and we are aware that this Communist state maintains a military division tasked with intruding into the communications of competing countries to learn trade secrets.  Similar intrusion is coming from Russia and it would be very unlikely that Australia did not have a military component seeking similar entry into competitors electronic systems.

Was that Coles disruption an unfriendly nation making a point ?   Competitor Woolworths had a similar incident several months ago, and this grocery duopoly is the ideal medium to gain national media coverage.  That outage obviously cost Coles a lot of money in lost sales and disruption to customer goodwill.  In the past, criminal gangs extorted what they termed " insurance " from local traders and those that refused to pay quickly suffered suspicious fires or broken windows.  It would seem possible that international criminals may be seeking   "protection " money from Coles and Woolworths with a threat of trading disruptions.

It was recently suggested that Australia should recruit more of the clever young people who seem to understand the complexity of the electronic world.   We certainly need our own cyber warriors if we are going to mount a defence against electronic disruption.  An electronic defence is just as important as defence by way of tanks and warships !