The Senate Environment and Communications Legislation Committee heard during Estimates on Monday afternoon that the two cryptocurrency-related incidents the Bureau of Meteorology (BOM) dealt with in February were un-related.
BOM CEO and Director of Meteorology Dr Andrew Johnson confirmed the bureau had suspended a third-party for serving up "fake news" advertising material on its website.
The advertisements, ABC reported[1] at the time, took users to a fake CNN news story about a bitcoin startup run by Elon Musk. The content encouraged readers to click on links that connected to websites known to be bitcoin-based scams.
Johnson said on Monday BOM has still suspended the third-party, leaving one party providing advertising revenue to the government through the bureau's website.
"Our whole advertising policy is underpinned by quite a significant and detailed set of interventions," Johnson said, answering a question asking what procedures have been put in place to prevent reoccurrence.
"We have a four stage review process, some of that's automated, some of that involves human beings actually undertaking manual checks -- that process is still in play -- and further, a very large majority of activity on the bureau has stood the test of time.
"We actually suspended them -- that's the way you control that -- we had doubts as to our legitimate concerns about to their capacity to block activity that's contrary to the bureau's policy, so the action we took was to suspend them."
BOM makes on average around AU$4 million from advertising services, and so far this year, the bureau has received about AU$2.3 million in revenue, Johnson said, noting also it costs BOM around AU$750,000 to run the website.
The revenue, however, passes through BOM and