The hasty and controversial departure of Qantas CEO Alan Joyce in 2023 was conveniently masked with stories of incompetence, homosexuality, illegal ticket sales, and arrogance. None of these stories, it appears from leaked documents, was the real reason why Joyce’s tenure at the airline came to an abrupt end.
Alan Joyce is believed to have overseen something more sinister at Qantas whilst he was its CEO. Alan’s departure, it is now known, was linked to the secret and unauthorised installation at Qantas terminals throughout Australia, of surveillance spyware.
The Israeli designed spyware is similar to that which ensnared travelers at Larnaka Airport in Cyprus now hacking passenger hardware at Qantas terminals in Australia. The installation of that intrusive and illegal spyware is blamed on Joyce. Joyce, it is said, approved of the spyware and its installation according to a senior group of Qantas management staff.
Travelers at Qantas terminals are oblivious to being hacked by the Israeli-designed eavesdropping ‘Predator’ spywareware at Qantas terminals in most major airports in Australia.The original idea of installing spyware in terminals, according to unnamed Qantas sources, was to capture critical travel and consumer data from unsuspecting travellers, a practice quite common in the US and in many West European countries.
Whether Joyce was aware of the intrusive characteristics of the Israeli-designed spyware, in that it spies on travelers, harvesting their private data, is a matter for conjecture at this point. He was CEO of Qantas at the time Predator was installed according to sources and was briefed on its uses and capbilities.
Predator, typically, is embedded into Wifi systems at shopping centers, hotels, universities, conference centers, and airport terminals, from which it harvests the login details, passwords, and personal data of anyone so much as surfing the internet or making a phone call by logging into the Wifi on premises in which the system is hosted.
Promoters of major music and sporting events are known to employ Predator and similar systems to harvest data of spectators at these events not just in Australia but also worldwide. Data is big business in any industry where constant angaging of data through harvesting and retention of clients is a critical means of being a step ahaed of the competition. And many large corporations gather data for their needs to beat the competition, quite often using unlawful means.
For Predator to work effectively, the software sets up several access points in the Wifi systems of their hosts, such as at airport terminals. Once activated Predator will harvest personal information by stealth from tens of millions of travelers and spectators at sporting and other events, through hacking their mobile devices at airport terminals and other places such as sports arenas where large numbers of people gather.
A non-resident installation technician, speaking on condition of anonymity said, that the installation of Predator and similar spyware in Australia has become widespread in government and in the private sector.
The Albanese government is said to have been given a formal but private briefing by Joyce whilst at Qantas, about the installation of Predator less than a week after his new labor government was sworn into office.
The extent of the risks of unreported and unmonitored domestic spying on Australian citizens using its virtue signaller Qantas, as a conduit for the purpose, is evident in the hacking of Telstra (not reported), Medicare, Optus, ASIC the ATO, Centrelink, and a number of other public and private institutions cannot be understated.
Qantas is suspected of providing a gateway to the creators of the software Predator, to spy on victims in the general public in Autralia through means of illegal hacking. A single weakened gateway is all that’s required to exploit and hack multiple systems no matter how well corporations believe their systems are secured.
The access points used by hackers to breach the security of many of their targets is blamed on the vulnerability created by organizations such as Qantas and its decision to allow Predator to operate locally.
Predator was set up and sold to Australia through one of its many Cyprus-based subsidiaries- Intellexa- allowing it to operate with impunity throughout Australia through the organizational and physical infrastructure of Qantas it is said.
Medicare, ASIC, the ATO and Optus have all been hacked on more than one occasion from information published on the Dark Web.
Hackers of each of these targets have released information of a highly confidential and sensitive nature from the data vaults of each of these hacked targets, something only an insider would recognize. The accuracy of recently hacked data in Australia was validated by two employees, one each from Medicare and Optus.
The danger in allowing a company like the Cyprus-based Intellexa that owns Predator to operate in Australia with relative impunity arises from the knowledge that Intellexa cannot be held legally accountable in Australia, as long as it is domiciled in a country such as Cyprus.
Hacked data obtained through spyware like Predator has been resold to the public through disappearing or ‘ghost’ Dark Websites which makes tracing the source of hacks, hackers and publishers of the stolen date impossible.
THE THREAT OF ELECTRONICALLY HIJACKING AN AIRPLANE IS NOW ALL TOO REAL
Klaus Muller, an airline security consultant in Europe has warned of the need to tighten information security on airlines, following the discovery of security breaches using hacked passwords of airline crews, found on the Dark Web recently.
Muller warned that today’s hijackers have access to the means to secure technology through nation-states friendly to their causes.
“Today it is possible to bring down an aircraft without guns if you are able to interfere with its flight computer and flight plan. The means for conducting such an attack is indeed relatively simple, made simpler by hacking access to the company’s operations control system using rogue software to hack passwords and other details of pilots, engineers, and flight controllers”.
Companies, the likes of Optus, Qantas, Medicare, the ATO, and ASIC, are all vulnerable to being repeatedly hacked because vulnerabilities and points of entry in their systems are already exposed.
In 2018 a company linked to former Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull was identified as being a front-runner in Turnbull’s plans for the sale of the ASIC register to the private sector. The company a Goldman Sachs client threatened a lawsuit against anyone linking it to Turnbull’s scuttled plans for the sale of the ASIC register to it.
Josh Grimwade
Australian, Singapore, Cyprus, Beijing, Shanghai, Moscow and major US airports hack anyone using their laptops or Androids there. It is where you find the hack dumps that matters. I worked as IT consultant for Qantas for over a decade. Their practices have changed for worse since Alan Joyce. The government also was involved.
I am not in the least bit surprised by this and other stories published here. I migrated from Singapore to Australia in 1996. I have remigrated to Singapore having quit Qantas in disgust. Now they offer me a ‘sign on bonus’ of $10,000 to return to my old job. Australia like Qantas is full of over paid underperforming executives. They would not survive a day in an efficient and performance driven environment like Singapore. (I am using a pseudonym).
Qantas does more than to hack into travellers apps and computers. It sells that information worldwide. All of it. A word of caution. Like most businesses (Telstra, Optus, Virgin) in its class, it also debits the credit cards of unsuspecting customers a few ‘insignificant dollars’ here and there. That amounts in total to millions of dollars in each billing period for no service. No one is willing to sue for recovery when a law suit will cost thousands of dollars for recovery of a mere $5-15. Keep your blog going.