Reverse Engineering – Uncovering The Truth

When the CEO of Optus came forward, feigning ignorance as to the cause of the 9 hour network outage in Australia, it prompted me to write this article and in so doing, perhaps make you aware of the things around you, that you can reverse engineer to uncover what is hidden from you. Reverse engineering is fundamentally about research and deduction. If all roads point to an intersection, you can reasonably predict that they must intersect, even though the intersection may not be visible. It’s that simple!

Reverse Engineering – Fact Checking The CEO

I found it impossible to believe, having working in a large technological company before, that the CEO was totally unaware of when major software releases are scheduled, or major system repairs are scheduled. Any technology CEO is aware of any thing that the technology departments are doing that impacts the company’s ability to earn revenue.

So let’s reverse engineer the event.

1. It occurred at approximately 4:00am.
2. Services became inoperable over a very short period.
3. Services included both GSM network and their Internet services
4. The extent of the fault was Australia-wide.

The following analysis fits the observed events:

1. The failure occurred at time at which the Optus network services are the quietest, as most people are sleeping. It is the time at which you would schedule a software upgrade, or replace some critical hardware. If this was the case, then the CEO is guaranteed to have known that this was scheduled on that particular day.
2. The failure cascaded over a very short period of time, typical of software issues relating to a large database and/or system software upgrade. Again, the CEO would have known that work was scheduled on that day.
3. The services affected included both the fixed network and the GSM (telephone) network. From this is suggests that the failure is not related to a hardware failure event. The fact that there was no building or major data centre burning or destroyed in an explosion, further suggests that a single hardware device or data-centre shutdown was unlikely. The fact that the hardware on such a system has redundancy, further suggests that it was not related to hardware.
4. The outage was country-wide. While it is possible that such an event could be a cascade, this is like looking for a complicated solution when a simple one is staring you in the face.
5. Bringing the system back into service took 9 hours. This would be consistent with the fact that the key personnel thoughout where reliant on the Optus network to communicate via mobile phone. Again, this should have been seriously obvious to the CEO on her first announcement to the public, yet this was only mentioned on the following day. All CEOs would certainly have seen a risk management plan for the company and would have understood that this was a weak link if such an event occurred.

Other Possibilities

Given that Optus had already had a cybercrime attack last year, it was suggested that this may have occurred. If this had occurred, it would have been known by their support personnel within minutes of the attack and would have implied that Optus had not tightened their security procedures of the 18 months since the last attack. While possible, this is again highly unlikely.

So now you can draw your own conclusion as to whether the CEO of this major company deflected both truth and responsibility when addressing the public. The fact that there are so many gaps in the communication issued by this person, certainly suggests that honesty and transparency are not part of the company profile.

Reverse Engineering – Make It Part Of Your Life

There are so many instances where major company CEOs, country and state leaders all over the world, make public announcements and pretend to be “honest and upfront” while crafting speeches that carefully avoid bring people’s attention to what is missing in their dialogue. This is exactly how the Fact Checkers earn their money, on a daily basis. In Australia, we saw this same behaviour, so often over the last 3 years during the Covid era.

In a world where technology is becomes increasingly more complex and cybercrime is becoming increasingly easier to commit, all organisations, either private or public, needs to reverse the trend of “hiding” knowledge and censoring information.

The onus is on everybody to reverse engineer all information that is issued in the public press releases and working out whether the people “in charge” are fit to govern, or the technology on which you may rely on from large businesses, can be trusted.

The human race relies on free and open information distribution to avoid making the same mistakes over and over again.

Scratch below the headlines relating to both science and medicine and you will see that by looking for what is not published, or who is being “de-platformed” by the social media giants, will quickly reveal the extent that people are going to, to keep you uninformed. It’s time to reverse engineer all of the information you are being dished out.

Proof That Reverse Engineering Works

As a final note, I feel that it is important to stress that thousands of people have worked tirelessly reverse engineering technology and closed-door standards that are designed to lock you into a product, or service, by companies such as Microsoft and many well known hardware vendors.

The fruit of their work has resulted development of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS).

Their software is freely available and covers a huge array of systems and applications. Their philosophy of sharing of knowledge has resulted in the development of the Linux operating system and thousands of hardware drivers for all the peripherals in modern computers that are managed by this operating system.