Malicious traffic knocks Macquarie customers offline

Macquarie, one of the biggest suppliers of voice, data, mobile and hosting services in Australia, upgraded its firewall and intrusion detections systems over the weekend. Despite taking "all the necessary precautions", many of the company's co-location customers found that over the next 48 hours their Web sites and intranet systems were either completely inaccessible or painfully slow.

According to a spokesperson, following the security upgrade Macquarie experienced an unexplained "avalanche in malicious traffic" over its network.

"There was an upgrade to the firewall and intrusion detection systems conducted over the weekend and since then there has been an avalanche in malicious traffic over the network," the spokesperson said.

The spokesperson was unable to clarify where the malicious traffic originated but confirmed that the outages only affected co-location customers based in Sydney.

"Co-location experienced intermittent network outages on Tuesday 11 January and Macquarie's engineers were working with IT departments to implement new firewall policies in line with the upgrades. A small number of customers might have experienced outages on Monday as well," the spokesperson said.

Macquarie claims to have taken "all the necessary precautions" prior to upgrading its systems.

"Prior to the upgrade, Macquarie took all the necessary precautions including beta testing with vendors to make sure there were no interruptions to customer services. But some of the circumstances could not be foreseen," the spokesperson said.

According to Macquarie, all problems were resolved and systems were fully operational by the end of Tuesday. The spokesperson said Macquarie will honour all service level guarantees including rebates and customer agreements.

Last October, Macquarie experienced serious technical difficulties that affected around ten percent of its co-location customers in the NSW area.