This means that weather permitting, Whakapapa will be open until November 15 (usually closing on October 26) and Tūroa will be open Friday to Monday from October 25 until November 16 (usually closing on October 18). Mr Dean said car park booking is no longer required so visitors can just drive up the mountain as usual.
Meanwhile, the net is closing on Mt Ruapehu hackers who disrupted the carpark allocation system on September 2. It was a nuisance-value incident compared to the rolling cyber attacks on the NZX that occurred at the same time.
Police production orders are pending which, once served on the alleged hackers' internet service providers, are expected to confirm the identity of three offenders - expected to be annoyed middle-class skiers rather than agents of the Chinese state or Ukrainian cybercrime lords.
The Mt Ruapehu bookable parking system was developed by Auckland company Theta - whose head of cyber security Jeremy Jones said there was a series of attempts to game or disable the parking system.
"There's a small cross-section of society who are avid skiers, and also work in IT, who were, shall we say, abusing their knowledge of technology to gain an unfair advantage," Jones told the NZ Herald.
"Whether they were trying to do it just to book a car park or whether they were trying to do it to discredit the application by taking it offline, because they object to restrictions, remains to be seen."
One person who was "abusing the application" was doing so from an IP address that indicated they worked for an IT company in Wellington; another was from an Auckland IT company; and another from a residential address in Auckland.
Jones - a Canterbury University engineering grad who spent 16 years working for the UK Ministry of Defence, including being charged with the defence of a Nato data centre - says he knows the names of the companies concerned but does not want to name them at this point. He says that would spoil the police's party.
