WA parliament blames virus for systems shutdown

Western Australia's Parliament House has blamed last week's cybersecurity breach that shut down communications networks at the building on a previously undiscovered virus.

Phone and internet networks and parliament's internal IT network were disabled as a precaution on Tuesday after a virus was discovered to have breached parliament's internal IT firewall, ITNews reported.

Investigations identified the virus as posing a threat to the parliament's core data store, Deputy Executive Manager of Parliamentary Services Rob Hunter told the publication.

The shutdown persisted until Wednesday, after parliament's IT vendors had time to assess the situation and provide technical input. But services were progressively restored to the extent that the midday sittings were not affected.

Hunter said there was no data loss as a result of the attack and that the speed with which the incident was detected and responded to was an indication of the effectiveness of parliament's risk management mitigation.

But the incident comes in the wake of a series of reports by the WA Auditor General that found the government's security processes and policies to be lacking.

Image courtesy of Yuri Samoilov under CC