Australian Technology News

Commonwealth Bank of Australia has had a rough couple of days; with high levels of traffic forcing it to take its internet banking service down at times. But what was really going on behind the scenes?

According to the bank's chief information officer Michael Harte, one of the issues was that many of its customers were attempting to get their end of financial year processing done. "Our firewalls were flooded with volume," Harte told ZDNet.com.au this afternoon.

Today, according to Harte, the bank had already seen its normal customer traffic, around 1.2 million separate logins, by around 3:30pm. "We were able to process a record number of transactions," he said. At 9:19 this morning, there were 18,700 concurrent users, 15 per cent above the bank's normal load, a situation Harte described as "success in scale".

But that wasn't the whole story; as the levels of traffic were quite unusual; normally the bank's highest traffic days are Easter and Christmas.

The bank also saw a higher percentage of traffic which it wasn't sure was bona fide. It quickly took steps to quarantine what it believed could be network nasties. "We had to see if it was malicious or not," Harte said.

The end result was that the bank had a scheduled outage. "At three different points we had to take the systems down," Harte said. However, contrary to the popular belief NetBank had been overwhelmed, Harte stressed these were planned actions. He said the system was up and running by 5:30pm yesterday and that it had not needed to be taken down today. As for security breaches, Harte said with confidence there were "none whatsoever".

Over all, we have to keep a trusted environment

CBA CIO Michael Harte

The CIO said that the bank would try to ascertain where the suspicious traffic had come from, but that it hadn't concluded its investigation yet. "You can never be 100 per cent sure where it's come from. Better to quarantine it," he said.

Harte regretted the necessity of taking the system down, but said it was in the best interests of the bank's users. "Over all, we have to keep a trusted environment," he said.

Going forward, CBA will continue to work to minimise occasions where the site has to be taken down via further work into autonomic provisioning to handle peaks and better methods of identifying users who come to the site often.

"You've at least identified them before and from that they're authenticated users," Harte said.

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in brief Corporate technology supplier Insight Enterprises has won a multi-million contract to sell Microsoft software to the whole of the Victorian Government.

A spokesperson for the state's Department of Treasury and Finance confirmed the contract, saying it would be utilised by approximately 40 departments and agencies.

The spokesperson did not reveal the value of the deal, however it was expected to be at least in the tens of millions of dollars, given its scale. The previous arrangement was believed to be held by now-disbanded IT services and products company Commander Communications.

"The contract value will be published on the Victorian Government contract publishing system in due course," said the spokesperson.

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Taiwanese manufacturer HTC today announced three new smartphone handsets in Australia, with two exclusively bound for Telstra and one to Optus.

All three smartphones run Windows Mobile 6.1, though two of them — the Diamond and the Pro — also include HTC's TouchFlo 3D user interface. The Snap is aimed at a lower-cost business market, still benefiting from ActivSync communication with MS Exchange servers, but without some of the extras included in the higher-end Diamond and Pro. The Snap sports a BlackBerry-like form factor with a full-QWERTY keyboard below its display and a centre jogwheel for navigating menus.

The Touch Diamond 2 and Touch Pro 2 are both touchscreen devices, with the Touch Pro also making use of a full-QWERTY keyboard hidden under a sliding mechanism. Reminiscent of the TyTn II, the sliding screen on the Touch Pro 2 tilts to a 45-degree angle once opened, helping make the screen more visible when typing. The Diamond 2 builds on the success of the original HTC Touch Diamond released last year, improving on the former's lacklustre processing performance and making use of a larger WVGA display.

All three handsets will be launched in Australia throughout July. The Snap and Touch Pro 2 will be short-term Telstra exclusives, with Optus enjoying a similar exclusive period for the Touch Diamond 2. Pricing will be announced by the carriers closer to launch.

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THE largest web banking tool
in the southern hemisphere is suffering "network problems".

Problems with Commonwealth Bank of Australia's internet banking website are due to a high level of traffic, some of which may be malicious, the bank said today.

But customers' money is safe, it claimed. "There have been no security breaches and no customer information, money or accounts have been accessed or compromised," Commonwealth Bank spokesman Steve Batten said.

"We are currently experiencing exceptionally high volumes of traffic, some of which appears to be malicious," he told AAP.

The source of the suspect traffic, and its type, had not yet been confirmed, he said. Customers have frequently been unable to access the NetBank internet site on Monday and Tuesday, a problem the bank has been working to rectify.

"We are working as a matter of urgency," Batten said, apologising for the inconvenience to customers. "To maintain the integrity of our customer information and our systems it is necessary to prioritise workload and demand based on transaction importance and to balance that with caution," he said.

"Consequently, there have been planned intermittent periods where NetBank has been unavailable. The CBA (Commonwealth Bank of Australia) will continue to prioritise workload in this manner until we are able to identify beyond any doubt the source and type of this unusual traffic."

"Customer information and privacy must be secured at all times. If that is ever under threat we must forgo convenience for a short time whilst services are assured."

Customers with problems, questions or concerns relating to NetBank are asked to call the NetBank helpdesk on 13 2221.

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in brief Microsoft has raised the stakes for conference swag, with paying attendees of its September Tech.Ed conference in Australia having the opportunity to go home with a new HP laptop.

The laptop will be a HP Mini 2140 netbook and come loaded with the latest public build of Windows 7. Microsoft intends to use the laptops to distribute conference materials and gather feedback to help develop local deployment training.

At the end of the conference, attendees will be able to keep the laptop as a gift or return it to Microsoft, which will donate the netbook to its On My Way program for disadvantaged Aussies. The Redmond giant says a small portion of netbooks will be reused by Microsoft for other events.

Hardware giveaways are not new to the Redmond giant; attendees of its Professional Developers Conference last year received a 160GB USB hard drive loaded with Windows 7 builds.

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AMATEUR astronomers and radio hams mark anniversary of Apollo 11 landings.

update South Australia's network of Technical and Further Education (TAFE) colleges has revealed itself as the latest education institution to plan a move to hosted email solution for staff and students.

In tender documents this week, the state's Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology, which oversees the TAFE network, specified it wanted to procure a cloud computing-based solution to provide email, calendaring and some collaboration functions to staff and students. TAFE SA provides services to around 80,000 students each year, and needs up to 100,000 mailboxes when staff are taken into account.

The department's move follows similar initiatives by other education departments and universities around the nation. Just last week Western Australia's Central TAFE picked Microsoft's hosted Live@edu platform for its 15,000 students.

The Universities of Queensland, New South Wales and Sydney, the Australian Catholic University, Victoria University and the Queensland University of Technology have all similarly gone with Live@edu, while others such as Macquarie University, the Universities of Adelaide and Auckland and the NSW Department of Education and Training have all picked the rival Gmail solution from Google.

The tender documents for the TAFE SA solution specified the department was looking for a solution for at least the next three years, with possible extensions. Users of the system would need to be able to send attachments of up to 20MB, and have a mailbox capacity of at least 7GB each.

The department also specified it required the solution to be capable of providing blogging functionality, along with the ability to publish photos, facilitate video-conferencing, allocate online file storage up to a minimum of 5GB, and provide a collaborative workspace for students to be able to work together in teams.

In addition, students must be able to view documents directly within their web browser. And the department has required the solution provide word processing and spreadsheet capability that can interoperate with Microsoft Office. Supported email protocols must include the IMAP and POP standards, as well as Apple's iCal calendar application.

The department specified that no advertisements must be displayed within the solution, and it must be able to brand the web presence of the solution using TAFE SA logos.

The department is planning to start rolling out the solution in early 2010.

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Despite a recent upbeat profit guidance, the nation's third-largest ISP iiNet last week let go of a number of staff; but it won't divulge numbers.

Responding to a discussion on broadband forum Whirlpool posted last Friday, iiNet chieftain Michael Malone said the number of staff retrenched from both iiNet and subsidiary Westnet was "not remotely close to 100".

"It was certainly more iiNet than Westnet. The focus was in the head office areas, not in customer service," he wrote.

The executive said the layoffs were not a sign that the Westnet and iiNet brands would be merged. iiNet, which is 22 per cent owned by fellow West Australian company, fibre network operator Amcom, acquired Westnet for $81 million May last year, adding 560 staff to its headcount.

At the time, Malone had said that iiNet would retain Westnet's brand and staff. He had also flagged that savings would come from its network rather than headcount.

Malone today declined to make any further comments on the layoffs, but told ZDNet.com.au: "This is a time to look forward, not backward."

The company earlier this month issued a full year net profit guidance of $25 million, up $1.7 million on the 2007/08 financial year, with the company saying it held a low enough debt burden to pursue growth through acquisitions and expanded operations.

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Boston Consulting Group was involved in the process that led to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) signing a $604 million extension with IT outsourcer EDS, the agency revealed yesterday.

The ATO has been working towards breaking up EDS' monopoly on its IT outsourcing roster, splitting its $1 billion technology contract into three segments over the past few years; managed network services, end user (desktop) computing, and centralised (mainframe) computing.

ATO announced earlier this month that the managed network services contract was to go to Optus, but the other two contracts are yet to be awarded to suppliers. Although the EDS contract for the other two services was set to expire June 2010, the two-year EDS extension announced yesterday will move the changeover back.

"BCG have been back again and they've been a part of it", ATO chief information officer Bill Gibson told ZDNet.com.au yesterday.

BCG has had an ongoing relationship with the ATO since its first engagement in 2007 to report on the agency's ICT procurement strategy. Over the two years, the agency has spent almost $8 million on consulting services with the group. The titles of the contracts have varied from "ICT Sourcing Strategy" to "Provide Support to EUC bundle strategy" and "Provide strategic direction to Centralised Computing bundle" to the final contract from March this year to June — "Perform ICT sourcing strategy refresh and vendor projects function".

Along with obtaining the consultant's opinion, the ATO had also been gathering intelligence from the industry. It had put out an expression of interest to vendors who might be able to provide the required services last year. Gibson said the response the ATO received was that the transition of the non-network components it required could be done, but not by June next year.

Instead, the sourcing contract change would take another three years from now. "We require some 18 to 24 months to transition our very comprehensive datacentre environment from EDS to a subsequent provider," Gibson said, noting that the period consisted of six months of planning and 18 months for the transition.

Although he admitted the agency might have wished to transition more quickly, Gibson said the advice it was receiving was not to rush it. "We're not going to put the operations of the tax office at risk," he said.

The ATO mentioned savings in its release yesterday to result from the longer EDS tenure. According to Gibson, the reason savings could be made via an extension rather than via a new contract was transition timing. The extension would allow better running of the agency's desktops, more virtualisation of its datacentres, and improvements in "operational reliability", according to Gibson.

The official request for tender has gone out for the desktop contract, but not yet for the mainframe contract.

The ATO's end-user computing deal, worth around $60 million a year, has CSC, HP/EDS, Fujitsu-owned Kaz Group, Lockheed Martin Australia and Unisys still in the race. The mainframe contract, worth around $160 million per year, has been whittled down to Lockheed Martin, CSC, IBM and incumbent EDS.

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