At the moment, the cause behind the outage is unclear — though a senior government official has ruled out a cyberattack.
About New Zealand Government’s RealMe Portal
The country’s Department of Internal Affairs (DIA) manages the RealMe portal. RealMe is an identity management service that facilitates secure access to government services. According to its website, 141 services across 44 organizations use the RealMe Login. This includes services such as Inland Revenue and My Covid Record, both of which were unavailable on Tuesday. The Companies Office also allows users to log in with RealMe. A statement on the Companies Office website reads as follows: “The RealMe service is currently experiencing intermittent issues so you may get an error message when you try to log in. The RealMe team are looking into the problem and hope to have it resolved quickly.”
Cybersecurity Experts Rule out Russian Cyber Attack
Earlier in the day, the Companies Office website was not reachable. Instead, it carried a message which read, “Attackers might be trying to steal your information from login.realme.govt.nz.” Later on Tuesday, the message read: “The resource you are looking for has been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable.” Certain businesses also appeared to face similar issues with their websites. JNCTN, a digital identification business, tweeted that some of its users had issues visiting the login page, and received an error stating: “Your connection is not private.” An hour later, JNCTN said the site was functioning normally. At the time of the outage, there was some suspicion of a possible Russian cyberattack. Last month, cybersecurity firm CyberCX warned of an increased risk of cybercrime in New Zealand due to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. However, CyberCX’s Adam Boileau said the RealMe issue was likely due to normal operational problems. “If it was Russian hacking it wouldn’t look like that,” Boileau stated.
Outage Likely Due to Issue with Microsoft Azure
Natasha Weight, DIA’s general manager of operations acknowledged that certain users faced trouble logging into RealMe, and also saw privacy error messages. On the positive side, Weight said that the vendor has looked into the outage and it is now resolved. Weight recommended that users still facing issues try clearing their browser cache and logging in. Weight also stated that the issue “was not related to a cyber-attack.” Rafael Gonzalez-Montero, New Zealand’s Parliamentary Service chief executive, and David Wilson, clerk of the house, issued a combined statement on the matter. The two officials stated that they were aware of the issue, and that it was caused by problems with Microsoft Azure. Furthermore, the issue did not affect the content on the Parliament website. If you want to learn about cloud services and how to safely protect your files in case of an outage, check out our full guide on cloud and backups.
