The website was still down on Wednesday afternoon, but now Australians can complete the census by September 23.
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The census will go back online sometime on Thursday.
His claim came hours after ABS Chief Statistician David Kalisch called the events leading up the shutdown as “malicious” and “an attack”. “It was quite clear it was malicious”.
The attempted attacks – and the possible source nation – are being investigated by the Australian Signals Directorate, the military’s cyber security intelligence agency.
“What you saw was the denial of service attack or a denial of service attempt which, as you know, is created to prevent access to a website as opposed to getting into the server behind it”.
Every five years, everyone in Australia is required to fill out forms are compiled to provide a snapshot of the country. It includes questions on topics such as work and marital status, place of birth, languages spoken and religion. The decision to conduct the national survey online and to keep the information for four years before it was destroyed instead of the usual 18 months heightened privacy concerns this year.
“It was deemed to be better last night to inconvenience Australians and to shut down the website than to compromise the data already collected and compromise further data that may well have been collected during the period”, he told a press conference this morning.
“In my view it doesn’t sound like a real denial of service attack”.
“The site has not been hacked, it has not been interfered with – their data is safe”.
Still, Australia’s Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said he will review the attacks to ensure no personal information was compromised. There were also doubts as to whether the census website could cope with under the load of real users, let alone fake ones, especially when you look at its public statements regarding load testing.
“This has been the worst-run census in Australian history and one of the worst IT debacles Australia has ever seen”, opposition MP Andrew Leigh said.
Some said Chinese hackers may have exacted retribution against Australia over a feud in recent days between two rival Chinese and Australian Olympic swimmers.
The minister who said the #CensusFail was not an attack or hack on Tuesday night appears to have had his own website hacked on Wednesday night. It has taken us 100 years to build confidence in the census.
Despite the outage, he said “more than 2 million forms were successfully submitted and safely stored” despite the three early attacks.
“If we don’t get an accurate snapshot on census night, we can’t allocate resources properly”.
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Alastair MacGibbon, the prime minister’s special adviser on cyber-security, said while government agencies routinely weathered such attacks without disruption, the Bureau of Statistics was the victim of a confluence of events.
