Paul Buchanan: Intelligence expert discusses Australian ship’s interference with Wellington Wi-Fi

There are plenty of questions after an Australian naval ship accidentally blocked internet and radio services across parts of the country.

It's understood the radar of the HMAS Canberra accidentally interfered with one of the shared spectrum bands that anyone can use free of charge.

Intelligence expert Paul Buchanan saysoperational security was lacking.

He wants to know why the Canberra was on a commercial band, given it's the most important ship in the Australian navy

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
More detail on last week's mass internet and radio outages
in the Capitol. So you can blame it. Turns out
the HMAS canbra as in the wullship, the Australian Naval
ship arrived in town and the internet went out. The
intelligence expert Paul Buchannan's back, Well, let's pull the morning
to you, good marning Mike. How does that happen?

Speaker 2 (00:16):
Ah, that's the million dollar question. Apparently they were using
a commercial shared free broadband spectrum for their navigation radar,
which right there raises some serious questions. But what it did.
As they cruised down the west coast of the North Island,

(00:36):
they produced rolling blackouts of the five giggerhearst network, the
wireless network as well as various radio stations. And as
they came into the Cooks Strait, then they started blacking
out the upper part of the South Island. And so
the question begs a why were they on a commercial band? Yeah,

(01:00):
given that that's the command ship of the of the
Australian Navy, that's the most important ship in their navy.
And sure they were coming here in a ceremonial meet
and greet. Sure they may have been in our territorial
waters and didn't really expect that, you know, an adversary
would be trying to track them. But let's just say

(01:21):
that operational security was lacking, and it may be due
to a very simple fact. It may be that someone
simply put in the wrong frequency as they came down,
because you know, just a rating, A guy sitting in
a chair on the bridge put in, you know, plugged
in one decimal number wrong and they got onto this bandwidth.

(01:42):
What I found interesting is that the New Zealand Defense
Forces don't want to bar this. They said they contacted
the Australians. The Australians took care of it, and the
story see you later. All questions are being referred to
the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Enterprise, which it turns
out manages this bandwidth, you know, this shared commercial bandwidth.

(02:08):
And I think, you know, there may be more to this.
Let's say, for example, if the warship was actually testing
critical infrastructure cyber defenses, which the GCSB does just to
see if they're running holes in the system vulnerabilities than that,
and they're friendly so they can tell us, okay, we're

(02:29):
finding this sort of stuff, and the internet providers basically said,
this shows our vulnerabilities. We had to go to backup
generators and automatic switches to close down the network because
we were afraid it was going to interfere with air flights.
So there's more questions than answers. But in the scheme

(02:49):
of things, well, probably was human error by a relatively
low ranking sailor, and other than egg on their face,
not much harm was done.

Speaker 1 (03:01):
It only mate, nice to talk to you, Paul bukenan
am I are you laughing with me? It's just like,
of course it was fat Fingerson droned the calls in
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