SABS is Imploding

Dear Editor

The Democratic Alliance can reveal, from multiple sources close to and within the SABS, that critical systems have been inoperable for six weeks, rendering the SABS unable to perform its most basic functions including product testing, issuing certificates, paying salaries or billing customers. The only functioning laboratory is the condoms laboratory while many others have no accreditation and clients cannot be serviced. This is putting businesses at risk as their systems and product certification is stalled or halted.

We will use the Portfolio Committee meeting on January 28th to probe Minister Parks Tau on his inaction in dealing with the South African Bureau of Standards’ disaster-in-the-making.

While Minister Parks Tau fiddles and dithers over the appointment of an independent investigation into governance and management failures at the South African Bureau of Standards, the institution is imploding before our very eyes.

Minister Tau is ignoring the mounting evidence that the SABS is facing catastrophic failure due to the cyber-attack it suffered in early December.

Unfortunately, this is the third attack in the last five years.

What is worse, the SABS disaster recovery and back-up systems have also been hacked, locked and encrypted. This means the SABS has no back-ups to restore and unless the hacker unlocks the IT systems, all of them will have to be re-built from scratch. This will take months at a minimum, perhaps years and at significant costs to the SABS to sort out.

Because the SABS’ important service providers are owed millions of rands in licence fees, they are not coming to the SABS’s rescue. Matters are so bad with the SABS technology that the enterprise resource planning (ERP) system has missed out on over 20 upgrades and the vendor no longer supports it.

It is now becoming evident that the hackers knew exactly which systems to target in the SABS IT architecture and could easily penetrate the outdated firewall. This can be explained by the earlier hacks the SABS suffered, which the hackers used as a look-see before unleashing their full-frontal attack and ransom demand in December.

The Democratic Alliance urges Minister Tau to place the SABS under Administration and to appoint an independent investigator for a period of three months to be able to deliver a final report on the SABS, so as to minimise further damage to this institution.

The DA calls on Minister Tau to insist that from today staff dismissals be halted and laptops/computers be safeguarded, to preserve vital evidence for the investigator.

The SABS’ efforts to maintain a quality system with modern national standards and its ability to ensure uncompromised certification services are critical to protecting South Africa’s reputation as a quality industrial nation.

Regards

Toby Chance MP
DA Spokesperson on Trade, Industry & Competition