Cashless society

[Value Collector]

@wayneL What, no hassle wasting your "precious" time travelling to the bank to deposit it??
We enjoy the chatter with the tellers when we drop our cash off.

Those tellers wages while you chat is the reason the banks are trying to get you do go digital, because they know there would be a fuss if they started charging appropriate cash handling fees, but they also know they can’t go on letting the rest of us that are moving with the times subsidising the cash transactions, so they want to put pressure on people to move away from cash.

 

[Bellcose]

I use credit cards

Used a debit card with NAB. Experienced zero issues yesterday.

 

[Value Collector]

If the bank systems are down what happens when you drop cash off. Does the teller enter all the details later when the system is available again? I've not be able to work it out at a technical level but then I've not seen any issues so far.

I admit I haven't seen the inside of a bank in over a decade, and I intend never to see the inside of one in my lifetime, but I don't recall anyone hanging around to have a natter with the bank staff. However, that was in capital cities. It must be different in smaller regions understandably as they are generally more friendly.

Often the bank will just close the doors and the ATM’s have an error message.

 

[JohnDe]

Saturday morning, and the cashless system is up and running again.

Nothing to see here now.

It was only a minor issue, easily sorted overnight. Only a few million people were inconvenienced, unable to make purchases for Friday afternoon and all night.

Commonwealth Bank, Coles services restored after cyber crisis

Friday’s chaos saw Australians unable complete online banking transactions or use debit cards at Coles and Woolworths, while Qantas was forced to delay flights, as what cyber experts labelled an “unmitigated disaster” unfurled over the nation and the world.

Coles said all its supermarkets were open on Saturday after customers were left unable to pay for groceries at some stores with bank cards on Friday.

 

[Bellcose]

It was only a minor issue, easily sorted overnight. Only a few million people were inconvenienced, unable to make purchases for Friday afternoon and all night.

Consider the upside though. If you're unable to purchase think of the money you've just saved.

It's not all gloom and doom you know.

 

[JohnDe]

Consider the upside though. If you're unable to purchase think of the money you've just saved.

It's not all gloom and doom you know.

Tell that to person crying at the checkout yesterday because she couldn’t pay for her groceries with her cashless system.

 

[JohnDe]

@wayneL What, no hassle wasting your "precious" time travelling to the bank to deposit it??
We enjoy the chatter with the tellers when we drop our cash off.

Same. I know a few by name, especially the financial guru that has helped us with our property portfolio.

Internet and phone services are all good, but there is nothing like personal visits and discussions. A lot more helpful when you’re talking face to face, and I’m sure that all the bank fees cover staff wages. Just have a look at the mega profits banks make.

 

[JohnDe]

I wonder if there will be compensation claims.

Australians – and millions of others across the globe – were left unable to pay for groceries at supermarket checkouts, complete internet banking or access essential medicines among other widespread disruption. ​

But the chaos Crowdstrike’s fault caused underlines how IT has become as essential as running water. It has become the bedrock of our economy and when it sneezes, everyone catches a cold.​

How did one company – Crowdstrike – cripple the world?

A company most people have never heard of upended the world, triggering a massive tech outage that knocked out big banks, hospitals, media companies and forced airlines to ground flights.

Crowdstrike – a US cybersecurity firm with a market value of $US83.5bn – triggered the chaos on Friday afternoon, rendering Microsoft-based PCs and laptops useless.

Australians – and millions of others across the globe – were left unable to pay for groceries at supermarket checkouts, complete internet banking or access essential medicines among other widespread disruption. At this masthead, editorial staff had to boot up 10-year-old MacBooks to get the paper out after their PCs displayed what is known as the “blue screen of death”.

The root cause wasn’t Windows, rather a faulty “single content update” from Crowdstrike, that it had pushed out to clients using Microsoft’s operating system.

While Crowdstrike’s engineers have identified the error and deployed a fix, its corporate clients still need to use a workaround. It could take days, if not weeks, for some users to get back online.

So how did one company cripple the world?

A cyber attack has become the biggest thing that keeps Australian executives at night after high-profile assaults on Medibank, Optus, Latitude Financial and most recently MediSecure.

Crowdstrike has been touting itself as a trusted partner and has been taking big swings at Microsoft. Chief executive George Kurtz accused Microsoft last year of using the “the same failed model that McAfee and Symantec have been using for the past 25 years”.

In March, it stepped up its criticism of Microsoft, branding it a “national security threat” after it was attacked by Russian hackers.

“In a year where 42 per cent of the world’s population is electing new leadership, I am concerned with how the potential access to Microsoft’s sensitive data and AI models may be misused by hostile nation states,” Crowdstrike’s head of counter adversary operations Adam Meyers said at the time.

There was a reason for Crowdstrike’s confidence. In the past year, it’s share price had more than doubled to $US343.05, becoming one of the hottest companies in the cybersecurity space, with its revenue growth averaging 67 per cent in the past three years, compared with 45 power cent growth for other cloud software companies.

And Australian companies – and others across the globe – were buying what it was selling.

Qantas, Coles, Woolworths and Bunnings were among some of the biggest companies to suffer outages as a result of a large-scale collapse at global cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike.

Bendigo Bank, Foxtel, National Australia Bank, Australia Post, Suncorp, Xero, NBN, Commonwealth Bank, MYOB, ME Bank, Telstra Amazon, Westpac, Google, ANZ and Microsoft were also among the companies caught in the mass shutdown.

Microsoft and Crowdstrike did not issue statements about the outage until about four hours after it left businesses paralysed. This has exposed a gaping flaw in Australia’s IT sovereignty.

The federal government convened a National Coordination Mechanism meeting on Friday evening, which Home Affairs Minister Claire O’Neil confirmed Crowdstrike attended.

“The company has informed us that most issues should be resolved through the fix they have provided, but given the size and nature of this incident it may take some time to resolve,” Ms O’Neil said.

“Governments are closely engaged at all levels, focused on bringing together the affected parties and ensuring government entities institute the fix as quickly as possible.”

But Monash University IT expert Nigel Phair said the outage underscored the dependency on internet related technologies.

“Organisations need to take an ‘all hazards’ approach to the availability of their IT networks and take appropriate risk management practices to ensure they can be resilient against any future incidents.”

Omer Grossman, chief information office at IT security company CyberArk, expected it would take days to restore full access.

“There are two main issues on the agenda: The first is how customers get back online and regain continuity of business processes. It turns out that because the endpoints have crashed – the Blue Screen of Death – they cannot be updated remotely and this the problem must be solved manually, endpoint by endpoint. This is expected to be a process that will take days,” Mr Grossman said.

“The second is around what caused the malfunction? The range of possibilities ranges from human error – for instance a developer who downloaded an update without sufficient quality control – to the complex and intriguing scenario of a deep cyberattack, prepared ahead of time and involving an attacker activating a “doomsday command” or “kill switch”. Crowdstrike’s analysis and updates in the coming days will be of the utmost interest.”

Crowdstrike chief executive George Kurtz ruled out a cyber attack.

“Crowdstrike is actively working with customers impacted by a defect found in a single content update for Windows hosts. Mac and Linux hosts are not impacted,” he said late on Friday.

“The issue has been identified, isolated and a fix has been deployed.”

But the chaos Crowdstrike’s fault caused underlines how IT has become as essential as running water. It has become the bedrock of our economy and when it sneezes, everyone catches a cold.

Thus it has become a fresh cause of insomnia for the nation’s top execs.

 

[divs4ever]

I wonder if there will be compensation claims.

Australians – and millions of others across the globe – were left unable to pay for groceries at supermarket checkouts, complete internet banking or access essential medicines among other widespread disruption. ​

But the chaos Crowdstrike’s fault caused underlines how IT has become as essential as running water. It has become the bedrock of our economy and when it sneezes, everyone catches a cold.​

View attachment 181140

this farm has rainwater tanks and two bores , and a creek that sometimes flows , water is essential yes , but a fair bit of backup strategies here

not to mention food in the pantry/freezers

 

[Craton]

When I was transitioning from a tradie to a techie, I could clearly see the writing on the wall over a quarter of a century ago. So yesterday's CrowdStrike fiasco came as no surprise to me.

From the ABC and how Dr Ripley nailed it on the head in (my bolds) the last to sentences below.

...cyber security experts are emerging from the past 24 hours more worried, not less.

"The key to resilience is not in predicting the future, but in being prepared to adapt," said Shane Ripley, chief information security officer at cyber security firm Recorded Future.

Shane Ripley, a senior threat analyst at cyber security firm Recorded Future.(Recorded Future)
"Yesterday was a clear indication that the collective 'we' is certainly not ready to adapt".

On top of that, we may have sleepwalked into a what Dr Ripley calls a "shadow risk" as great as those that dominate our nightmares and screenplays.

That risk, he argued, is the over-reliance of the world's critical systems on a shrinking pool of service providers.

Put simply, there are too many of us using too few of the same tech companies — all in the name of cost-saving and convenience.

I've often touted privately and echoed by many others within these chambers, our over-reliance on the "digital realm" with all its supporting and necessary infrastructure is setting us up for a big fail.
Therefore we must have robust redundancy mechanisms in place or at least some form of fallback thus, when it comes to offline payment systems, cash is king!

Something else to ponder.
Due to a few lines of code taking down millions of computers across the globe and affecting a myriad of organisations both govt. and non-govt. one can just see the Threat and Bad actors and Nation States wringing their hands with glee and saying, "Eureka, therein lies the key!"

I certainly hope and expect that this is a huge wake up call to each and everyone of us because as that piece from the ABC also reports:-

As the crisis was unfolding, UNSW's sober-minded and well-respected cyber security expert, Professor Richard Buckland, named it as such on national TV.

"It is playing out how an attack would play out," he told the ABC.

"We could be getting a taste now, even if it is just a dress rehearsal for what a cyber warfare or cyber terror attack would look like."

 

[moXJO]

Fascinating. Are they putting in any arrangements for those customers who walk in without cash? ATM maybe? Or are they happy for say 10 customers who may have otherwise spent $50, $100 or more each to turn around and leave?

I know a Vietnamese bakery with amazing pork/chicken rolls. Cash only, endless stream of customers no atm. If the food is good people will find the cash.

 

[Craton]

Last night my partner and I (we are widow and widower) celebrated a dozen years of "finding-our-2nd-love" at one of our favourite eateries, The Old Salt Bush Restaurant and Catering.

With local or Aussie products Chef Lee prepares superbly delicious meals, provides a gorgeous wine list and fantastic wait service. So-much-so, partner wanted to show her appreciation to both wait staff that took care of us. Image asking the staff for their banking details so she could digitally provide a generous tip to said wait staff?!?

Partner pulled out and handed over the folding stuff and jaw dropped both of them. Pity I wasn't fast enough to take a pic as that moment was priceless.
We paid in cash for our meals and the few shekels (not) in change also went into the Tips jar.

It's that tactile interaction that using cash gives and the interaction with our fellow earth citizens it provided, that made our special occasion even more enjoyable and precious.
In contrast, using EFTPOS would have felt soulless, robotic and made us feel like just another paying customer instead of sharing a fleeting celebratory moment in time.

 

[Value Collector]

When I was transitioning from a tradie to a techie, I could clearly see the writing on the wall over a quarter of a century ago. So yesterday's CrowdStrike fiasco came as no surprise to me.

From the ABC and how Dr Ripley nailed it on the head in (my bolds) the last to sentences below.


I've often touted privately and echoed by many others within these chambers, our over-reliance on the "digital realm" with all its supporting and necessary infrastructure is setting us up for a big fail.
Therefore we must have robust redundancy mechanisms in place or at least some form of fallback thus, when it comes to offline payment systems, cash is king!

Something else to ponder.
Due to a few lines of code taking down millions of computers across the globe and affecting a myriad of organisations both govt. and non-govt. one can just see the Threat and Bad actors and Nation States wringing their hands with glee and saying, "Eureka, therein lies the key!"

I certainly hope and expect that this is a huge wake up call to each and everyone of us because as that piece from the ABC also reports:-

When technology Is so good that people fear it might be switched off, do you really want to avoid the technology?

I mean, computers and digital tech bring billions of dollars of value into the global economy every day… sure a hacker could mess it up for a few hours here and there, but would it be worth avoiding it simply because it might fail sometimes?

It’s like saying you want to avoid owning a car because sometimes cars break down, horses are that great and cars don’t break down often enough to want to stick to horses.

 

[Value Collector]

I know a Vietnamese bakery with amazing pork/chicken rolls. Cash only, endless stream of customers no atm. If the food is good people will find the cash.

I carry a $50 note for such occasions, but I do think it’s rude if a business expects me to use it, especially when they often then ask if I have anything smaller… I feel like saying “How about you just let me put the $3.50 for the sushi roll on my card like a real business, and then you don’t have to worry about finding change”

Processing the $3.50 card transaction would cost them 3.5 cents, and to think that for the sake of that 3.5 cents they want to

A, make my life more difficult by expecting me to go to an ATM to replace my $50 note, and deal with coins etc.

B, have an awkward conversation about change, and worry that I might have cleaned them out.

C, make it so now they have to bank cash, to pay their bills.

The only real benefit I can see with them only wanting to accept cash is that it makes it easier for them to carry out tax evasion, maybe the think that makes all the negatives worth it.

 

[divs4ever]

When technology Is so good that people fear it might be switched off, do you really want to avoid the technology?

- YES

i have seen what the 'white hats ' have to do to get rushed products into the markets ,working effectively , AND if you find a major flaw they are just as liable to send a team of lawyers out to force you to sign a non-disclosure agreement

and i am not talking Joe Bloggs software , i am talking the biggest names in computers ( and they blatantly lie to customers of all sizes , especially governments , and blame the user )

and after they have sold you expensive,defective crap they have the gall to charge you for 'customer support , certification etc etc

 

[Smurf1976]

When technology Is so good that people fear it might be switched off, do you really want to avoid the technology?

I mean, computers and digital tech bring billions of dollars of value into the global economy every day… sure a hacker could mess it up for a few hours here and there, but would it be worth avoiding it simply because it might fail sometimes?

Without wanting to offend anyone personally, and I'm sure there are individuals for whom this does not apply, but for me it comes down to my lived experience both personal and professional.

Suffice to say IT is a long way down the list of professions I'd put trust in. Because I've simply encountered far too many incidents of obvious failures to follow proper testing procedures or even intentional bad actions.

Even big name companies have that problem - an update Friday night or Saturday morning, then it's broken until someone fixes it on Monday. That's a pretty sure indication that they didn't even test it properly after implementation and just went home. Big software companies, banks, stockbrokers, solar inverters - I've seen stuff ups with all of those just in the past few months.

It's a culture that has no place in a situation where failure brings serious consequences. This recent incident having done everything from leaving travellers stranded to cancelling surgeries in hospitals, to stopping motorsports to closing supermarkets. Some are more serious than others but those are all real world, physical impacts.

It's one thing to put faith in something where you know everything's being done "by the book" and the chance of failure, whilst never zero, is remote. It's quite something else however to put faith in something where mishaps are routine and the attitude seems to be one of not being concerned.

One of the keys seems to be a lack of communication. Taking the recent Iress issues as an example, they certainly didn't inform customers that they'd be disabling the system not just all weekend but into the following week as well and that it'd take two weeks to get it working sort-of properly and even then it's a downgrade in some respects with less detail and now far slower. Now that's a system being used by people with real money on the line and real consequences from failure.

IT seems to have an attitude that they can do whatever they like whenever they like. Completely forgetting that actually the customer owns the hardware and has paid for a license to use the software that was sold as having certain features. Likewise it's the customer's money in the bank, or they've paid to fly from A to B or they've paid to see a show or whatever. It's not for someone in IT to decide to just take that away.

An issue there is nobody else would get away with the same conduct. If someone decided to take back what a consumer had purchased, to not provide what was paid for, or to shut down banks or airports, they'd find themselves in massive trouble legally unless due to circumstances legitimately beyond their control.

Now from a personal perspective well I use computers, I use EFTPOS and so on yes. But I don't take it for granted that it'll keep working, since I'm consciously aware of the above. So I've got cash in my wallet, there's food in the house, petrol in the tank, etc.

 

[qldfrog]

Same. I know a few by name, especially the financial guru that has helped us with our property portfolio.

Internet and phone services are all good, but there is nothing like personal visits and discussions. A lot more helpful when you’re talking face to face, and I’m sure that all the bank fees cover staff wages. Just have a look at the mega profits banks make.

Plus there are people that have financial matters a bit more complicated than "the rest of them that are moving with the sheeps" on internet banking
All my company, trust and partnership major events require face to face interactions with CBA.not available on netbank.
Plus a few tips to add better returns on cash holdings etc...still CBA savings interests so not that great but good enough while money get allocated.
I had cash on me on friday but our great day off with beach walk, cafe, shopping and fuel was over by 3pm..great timing
Note
I always pay cash for aldi to save the CC charge anyway
The day i can not access a teller when I need one is the day i will leave CBA..
All other banks i use are online only .

 

[Value Collector]

Plus there are people that have financial matters a bit more complicated than "the rest of them that are moving with the sheeps" on internet banking
All my company, trust and partnership major events require face to face interactions with CBA.not available on netbank.
Plus a few tips to add better returns on cash holdings etc...still CBA savings interests so not that great but good enough while money get allocated.
I had cash on me on friday but our great day off with beach walk, cafe, shopping and fuel was over by 3pm..great timing
Note
I always pay cash for aldi to save the CC charge anyway
The day i can not access a teller when I need one is the day i will leave CBA..
All other banks i use are online only .

Saving the CC fee at Aldi doesn’t really add up for me. Because using my card earns me about 3% in benefits. Eg, earned interest by having cash in account longer, points etc

So “saving the fee” costs me 2%

 

[Bellcose]

Tell that to person crying at the checkout yesterday because she couldn’t pay for her groceries with her cashless system.

That is really sad for the lady. Yet others in the same situation are able shrug their shoulders and realise there is a tomorrow and the purchases can be made then. Depends on an individual's approach to the circumstances.

I've been inconvenienced by technology failures such as stuck at Brisbane airport for hours. Last week, on a very cold day, a power outage for most of the day. I coped by putting on an additional layer of clothing but others have greater issues. Reliance on medical equipment for one. People being unable to pay for goods due to techo faults isn't high on my list of what I view as disasters.

 

[qldfrog]

That is really sad for the lady. Yet others in the same situation are able shrug their shoulders and realise there is a tomorrow and the purchases can be made then. Depends on an individual's approach to the circumstances.

I've been inconvenienced by technology failures such as stuck at Brisbane airport for hours. Last week, on a very cold day, a power outage for most of the day. I coped by putting on an additional layer of clothing but others have greater issues. Reliance on medical equipment for one. People being unable to pay for goods due to techo faults isn't high on my list of what I view as disasters.

As long as you can still eat something on your next meal..but I overall agree:
Many have priorities wrong in life