Vic water authorities vulnerable to cyber attack

Vic water authorities vulnerable to cyber attack: A state government audit into Victoria’s water authorities has revealed much of the critical infrastructure towns and cities rely upon remains vulnerable to electronic attack.

The Victorian auditor-general John Doyle today warned many of the 19 water bodies would remain oblivious if a breach of their core systems was to occur.

The findings follow the alarming discovery made by Doyle’s peers in Queensland, who found that Brisbane’s traffic management systems were littered with security holes just 12 months out from the G20 leader’s summit.

In most cases, each instance of privileged access to core agency systems was at least recorded, despite the feed not being monitored to detect inappropriate intrusions, Doyle found.

“Monitoring processes varied from regular reviews, ad hoc or ‘as required’ reviews to no review,” the report said. “We identified six instances where privileged user accounts were not managed appropriately.”

Doyle also took issue with sloppy maintenance of software patches by a handful of the audited bodies.