The five-yearly census suffered three attacks during Tuesday local time and then after 7.30pm was hit by a major fourth barrage, which it said coincided with a surge in genuine visitors to the site, presumably trying to fill in their forms online after work and before the midnight deadline.
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Australians could start filling out the forms from Tuesday, but the system crashed as millions of early birds attempted to fulfill their census duty.
As the attacks appear to have occurred at a time when most Australians had yet to complete the Census form, it seems plausible at this stage that the primary goal was to disable the system rather than access personal information.
Although the names will be destroyed after those four years, the ABS created linkage keys which link names to other data they collect which will be kept indefinitely.
There was one problem with Australians’ attempt to finish their government-mandated census on Tuesday-something they had to do to avoid paying a potential fine.
Mr Kalisch said he believed the details of people – including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – who had managed to successfully access the site were secure.
Put simply, a DoS attack is a malicious attempt to render a computing service unavailable, usually by overwhelming it with large numbers of requests and overloading the servers.
“One thing I would say is that there was an bad lot of conjecture about the census and its online activities”.
The paper census now looks like a more reliable option after the website promoted by the government as its preferred option was hacked and taken offline on census night.
The attacks on the ABS and census will now be investigated by the Australian privacy commissioner.
The census website was not back online Wednesday.
But after struggling to allay public concerns over privacy, the ABS may once again be losing the battle to keep the public calm, with mainstream media already picking up the “hack” angle.
University of Wollongong Computing and Information Technology head of school Professor Willy Susilo said his feeling was that the census was targeted and the ABS could have foreseen this.
Assistant Treasurer Michael McCormack, the minister responsible for the census, is now facing calls for his resignation after the outage, which lasted several hours.
This is the first time the Australian government has not completed the census in its 105-year history, according to Reuters.
He said the ABS was working to restore the website service as quickly as possible.
“What I’m concerned about is that the Government is going to pass the buck”, he said.
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Senate crossbencher Nick Xenophon said he would move for a Senate inquiry into the debacle as soon as the Senate met.
