Australia’s prime minister has promised “heads will roll” after an online attack left millions of people locked out the country’s census website.
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The Australian Bureau of Statistics and the Turnbull Government yesterday released a series of contradictory explanations for the failure of the census servers on Tuesday night, blaming it on an attack, a distributed denial of service (DDoS) “attempt”, a faulty router and an unexpected spike in traffic from the United States when a geo-block to prevent worldwide traffic reportedly failed.
Turnbull said that “measures that ought to have been in place to prevent these denial of service attacks interfering with access to the website were not put in place”.
The site was taken down on Tuesday night after what the government calls a “confluence of events”, including the last of several denial-of-service attacks, a hardware failure, and some “anomalous traffic” that raised questions but turned out to be innocent.
The Bureau of Statistics made a decision to shut down the site during a peak period out of “an abundance of caution” and no data had been hacked, Turnbull said.
Turnbull says the system failures have been corrected at his personal direction under the supervision of government’s top electronic security and intelligence agency, Australian Signals Directorate.
Almost 44 hours after the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) pulled the plug on its website on Census night, the site is finally back online.
“I too am very angry about this, I am bitterly disappointed about this”, he told radio station 2GB. A denial-of-service attack was as predictable for a site like this as “that the rain will fall one day or that the sun will come up another”.
Kalisch said that no data from the 2.3 million forms already submitted to the Australian Bureau of Statistics had been stolen.
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Australians are required to complete the census every five years or face fines, and this was the first time there had been a major push for people to fill in the survey online.
