Downtime: When IT Goes Wrong

Complete Uptime Solutions

Downtime tells the stories of real IT disasters: the outages, ransomware attacks, data breaches and fake invoices that stopped businesses in their tracks, and turns each one into plain-English lessons for Australian business owners. Every Tuesday, one incident, told as a story: what happened, why, and what would have prevented it. Every Thursday, the Downtime Brief: the week's IT and cyber security news that matters to a small or mid-sized Australian business. No jargon, no scare tactics, just what to do about it. Downtime is brought to you by Complete Uptime Solutions, managed IT and cyber security for Australian businesses. Get a free IT risk snapshot at completeuptimesolutions.com.au or call 02 8214 4612.

  1. 3d ago

    Downtime Brief: A Victorian GP Clinic Breach, Fake Online Shops and a Race to Patch VPNs

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Health care had a rough fortnight: a regional Victorian GP network confirmed a data breach after a ransomware group listed it online, and NSW Health declared a major incident after a dental voucher website was hacked. Scamwatch warned about fake online shops built with AI, researchers showed how quickly attackers now turn published bugs into working attacks, and tens of thousands of cheap Android TV boxes in Australia turned out to have come pre-infected. This week's stories: Epichealth Medical Clinics and the NSW Health Oral Health Fee For Service Scheme incident, and what a practice should have ready; Scamwatch's figures on buying and selling scams, 58.7% of loss reports so far this year, and scammers copying real business names and logos; Ivanti's VPN fixes (versions 25.1.1.3 and 22.8R2.6) and research showing the fastest attack came 35 minutes after details of a bug went public, ahead of November's Patch Tuesday and Fortinet's advisories; the XCPE botnet, with 34,206 pre-infected devices counted in Australia; Microsoft's new limits on free Copilot Chat from 9 November; and the OAIC's inquiry into court recordings accessed by an overseas subcontractor. Fix this week: AI tools at work, and what not to paste into a chatbot. Downtime is brought to you by Complete Uptime Solutions, managed IT and cyber security for Australian businesses. Get a free IT risk snapshot at completeuptimesolutions.com.au or call 02 8214 4612. Sources: Scamwatch (National Anti-Scam Centre), Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, Cyber Security NSW and NSW Police via ABC News, Microsoft 365 Message Center, Cyber Daily, iTnews, BleepingComputer, Help Net Security.

    Downtime Brief: A Victorian GP Clinic Breach, Fake Online Shops and a Race to Patch VPNs

  2. 5d ago

    DP World: The Weekend Australia's Container Ports Went Dark

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Three years ago this week, on Friday 10 November 2023, DP World Australia found intruders in its corporate network and cut itself off from the internet. Trucks stopped moving at its container terminals in Sydney, Melbourne, Brisbane and Fremantle, which handle almost 40% of the country's container trade. By the time the gates reopened on Monday morning, about 30,000 containers were stuck on the wharves. You'll come away understanding why the people who supply your business are part of your own IT risk, why the boxes at the edge of your network (firewalls, VPNs and remote access gateways) need patching first, why someone in your business needs the authority to pull the plug, why "we're back up" doesn't mean "it's over", why staff records deserve the same care as customer data, and why keeping a written record of disruption matters when it comes to insurance and claims. A practical first step: list the three suppliers your business couldn't trade without for a week, and write down what you'd do if each one went dark on a Friday night. Downtime is brought to you by Complete Uptime Solutions, managed IT and cyber security for Australian businesses. Get a free IT risk snapshot at completeuptimesolutions.com.au or call 02 8214 4612. Sources: DP World Australia media statements (November 2023), National Cyber Security Coordinator and Minister for Cyber Security statements as reported by Reuters and Bloomberg, Australian Signals Directorate (cyber.gov.au), BleepingComputer, Capital Brief, The Guardian, SmartCompany, The Conversation, iTWire and Cyber Daily.

    DP World: The Weekend Australia's Container Ports Went Dark

  3. Oct 28

    Downtime Brief: The PHP Scramble, Fortinet's Urgent Patches and ASD's Threat Report

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! A week when bugs found by artificial intelligence hit the real world. Websites around the world, including the Australian Signals Directorate's own, went offline as operators rushed to patch two critical flaws in PHP, the language behind WordPress. Fortinet pushed urgent firewall updates, ASD released its Annual Cyber Threat Report, and the privacy regulator reported a jump in very large data breaches. This week's stories: the PHP vulnerabilities and what to ask your web host (fixed in PHP 8.5.12, 8.4.27, 8.3.36 and 8.2.35); Fortinet's priority updates for FortiOS, FortiManager and FortiAnalyzer, with full advisories due 10 November; ASD's Annual Cyber Threat Report 2025–26, where the average self-reported cybercrime cost for a medium business rose 45% to $141,300, plus a Melbourne furniture business that nearly lost $118,000 to a fake change of bank details; the OAIC's January to June 2026 breach statistics, with 11 breaches affecting more than a million people, alongside recent incidents at Canva (through a third-party feedback tool), a Sydney schools council and a Sunshine Coast accounting firm; ASD Essentials, the successor to the Essential Eight; and a Microsoft 365 password reset change arriving on 9 November. Fix this week: MFA types compared. Why SMS codes are the weakest kind of multi-factor authentication, what number matching does, and why passkeys and security keys are what ASD now recommends. Downtime is brought to you by Complete Uptime Solutions, managed IT and cyber security for Australian businesses. Get a free IT risk snapshot at completeuptimesolutions.com.au or call 02 8214 4612. Sources: Australian Signals Directorate (cyber.gov.au alerts, Annual Cyber Threat Report 2025–26 and ASD Essentials), PHP Group (php.net), Fortinet, Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, ABC News, SBS News, Cyber Daily, SmartCompany, Microsoft.

    Downtime Brief: The PHP Scramble, Fortinet's Urgent Patches and ASD's Threat Report

  4. Oct 26

    Colonial Pipeline: One Old Password That Emptied the Petrol Stations

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Just before 5 am on Friday 7 May 2021, a control room employee at Colonial Pipeline, which carries nearly half the fuel used on the US east coast, found a ransom note on a computer screen. Within about an hour all 5,500 miles of pipeline had been shut down, and within days petrol stations from Atlanta to Washington were running dry. The way in, the company later told the US Senate, was a legacy VPN account that was not meant to be in use and was protected by nothing more than a password. This episode tells the story of the DarkSide ransomware attack, the US$4.4 million ransom, and how the FBI clawed back US$2.3 million of it. You'll come away understanding why old and unused accounts are among the most dangerous things on your network, and how a quarterly account clean-up closes them; why multi-factor authentication belongs on every way into your business, and why Australia's new ASD Essentials framework now asks for the phishing-resistant kind; why a password reused anywhere is a password leaked everywhere; how attackers sat inside Colonial for nine days, and what simple alerts help you spot that; and why knowing how you would keep trading by hand, with offline backups you have actually restored from, matters as much as any lock on the door. We also cover what Australian law now asks of you if you are ever extorted. A practical first step: this week, ask whoever manages your IT for a list of every account that can log in to your systems from outside the office, and switch off any that belong to people who have left. Downtime is brought to you by Complete Uptime Solutions, managed IT and cyber security for Australian businesses. Get a free IT risk snapshot at completeuptimesolutions.com.au or call 02 8214 4612. Sources: Colonial Pipeline CEO Joseph Blount's testimony to the US Senate Homeland Security Committee; US Department of Justice; CISA and FBI joint advisory AA21-131A; Bloomberg News; Idaho National Laboratory CyOTE case study; Australian Signals Directorate.

    Colonial Pipeline: One Old Password That Emptied the Petrol Stations

  5. Oct 21

    Latitude Financial: The 14 Million Records Nobody Needed Anymore

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In March 2023, Australian lender Latitude Financial announced a cyber attack it first thought had touched about 330,000 people. Eleven days later the count was about 14 million records, including roughly 7.9 million driver licence numbers, many belonging to people who had stopped being customers years earlier. This is the story of how one set of stolen staff login details turned into what was described at the time as the largest known breach of an Australian financial company, why Latitude refused to pay the ransom, and what it cost. You'll come away understanding why the safest customer data is the data you no longer keep, and how to set a simple retention and deletion schedule; where your business stands under the Privacy Act and the Notifiable Data Breaches scheme, including the A$3 million turnover threshold and the many exceptions to it, plus where the 2024 and 2026 reforms are heading; why every supplier login into your systems needs its own account, multi-factor authentication and an expiry date; why multi-factor authentication on email and remote access is the cheapest insurance you can buy; and how to communicate honestly with customers when the numbers keep changing. A practical first step: this week, list every place your business stores copies of customer ID documents, and ask whether you still need each one. Downtime is brought to you by Complete Uptime Solutions, managed IT and cyber security for Australian businesses. Get a free IT risk snapshot at completeuptimesolutions.com.au or call 02 8214 4612. Sources: Latitude Financial ASX announcements and results; Office of the Australian Information Commissioner; Australian Computer Society Information Age; iTWire; Capital Brief; Service NSW.

    Latitude Financial: The 14 Million Records Nobody Needed Anymore

  6. Oct 21

    The OVHcloud Fire: When the Backup Was in the Same Building

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! Just before 1 am on 10 March 2021, a fire broke out in a power room at OVHcloud's data centre campus in Strasbourg, France. By morning one building was gone, part of another was destroyed, and an estimated 3.6 million websites were offline. Some customers discovered that their "backups" had been sitting in the same buildings as the servers they were meant to protect. You'll come away understanding what a data centre actually is and why even a well-run one can burn; why a backup in the same building, or even the same campus, is not really a backup; the 3-2-1 rule (three copies, two different kinds of storage, one off-site, with at least one copy offline or impossible to change); why a backup you have never restored from is only a hope; how to find out where your data physically lives; and why you need to read what your cloud or hosting contract really promises, because the French courts found that the fine print on liability matters a great deal. A practical first step: ask whoever runs your systems to restore one important file and one whole system from backup this month, and to tell you, in writing, which city each copy of your data lives in. Downtime is brought to you by Complete Uptime Solutions, managed IT and cyber security for Australian businesses. Get a free IT risk snapshot at completeuptimesolutions.com.au or call 02 8214 4612. Sources: OVHcloud incident updates and statements by founder Octave Klaba; the French accident investigation bureau BEA-RI report (May 2022); the Bas-Rhin fire service report as reported by The Register; Netcraft; DatacenterDynamics, Blocks and Files and LeMagIT coverage of the Lille and Douai court rulings; Australian Cyber Security Centre Essential Eight guidance.

    The OVHcloud Fire: When the Backup Was in the Same Building

  7. Oct 21

    The Facebook Outage: Six Hours When Facebook Vanished from the Internet

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! On 4 October 2021, a single command during routine maintenance cut Facebook off from its own data centres. Within minutes, Facebook, Instagram, WhatsApp and Messenger disappeared from the internet worldwide for about six hours, and engineers reportedly struggled even to get into the buildings to fix it. For the small businesses that took orders through Instagram and WhatsApp, the shop was simply shut. You'll come away understanding what DNS and BGP are, in plain English, and why one mistake made a giant vanish; why you should own your customer list, website, domain and email rather than renting your whole business from one platform; why every business needs a back door into its own systems when the front door is broken; why your critical how-to documents and phone numbers should exist offline and on paper; and why even small changes deserve a simple change-control habit. A practical first step: this week, export your customer contacts from every platform you sell through and store a copy somewhere you control. Downtime is brought to you by Complete Uptime Solutions, managed IT and cyber security for Australian businesses. Get a free IT risk snapshot at completeuptimesolutions.com.au or call 02 8214 4612. Sources: Meta Engineering blog (Santosh Janardhan), Cloudflare, The New York Times, Reuters, Thomson Reuters Foundation, Wired.

    The Facebook Outage: Six Hours When Facebook Vanished from the Internet

  8. Oct 21

    Atlassian: The Script That Deleted 883 Customer Sites

    Got something to say to this podcast? Send a voicemail, and you might hear yourself on the next episode! In April 2022 a routine clean-up script at Sydney-founded software giant Atlassian was handed the wrong list of IDs and run in the wrong mode. Instead of removing one old app, it deleted 883 whole cloud sites belonging to 775 customers, and some of those businesses waited up to 14 days to get their Jira and Confluence back. This episode walks through what happened, why the restore was so slow, and what Atlassian's unusually candid post-incident review teaches every small business that runs on cloud software. You'll come away understanding why your software provider's backup is not your backup; how to ask each cloud tool two plain questions, "how much could I lose?" and "how long until I'm back?"; why a regular export of your critical data is cheap insurance; why you need a way to reach your staff and customers that doesn't depend on the system that's down; and how "mark it first, delete it later" thinking and simple change control protect your own IT from the same kind of slip. A practical first step: list the five cloud services your business can't run without, and for each one, find out today whether you can download a full copy of your data. Downtime is brought to you by Complete Uptime Solutions, managed IT and cyber security for Australian businesses. Get a free IT risk snapshot at completeuptimesolutions.com.au or call 02 8214 4612. Sources: Atlassian Post-Incident Review (April 2022 outage); Atlassian CTO Sri Viswanath's outage update; The Register; TechTarget; ACS Information Age; Australian Cyber Security Centre (Essential Eight).

    Atlassian: The Script That Deleted 883 Customer Sites
See All (14)

About

Downtime tells the stories of real IT disasters: the outages, ransomware attacks, data breaches and fake invoices that stopped businesses in their tracks, and turns each one into plain-English lessons for Australian business owners. Every Tuesday, one incident, told as a story: what happened, why, and what would have prevented it. Every Thursday, the Downtime Brief: the week's IT and cyber security news that matters to a small or mid-sized Australian business. No jargon, no scare tactics, just what to do about it. Downtime is brought to you by Complete Uptime Solutions, managed IT and cyber security for Australian businesses. Get a free IT risk snapshot at completeuptimesolutions.com.au or call 02 8214 4612.

Information

  • Creator
    Complete Uptime Solutions
  • Years Active
    2026
  • Episodes
    14
  • Rating
    Clean
  • Copyright
    © Complete Uptime Solutions
  • Show Website
    Downtime: When IT Goes Wrong