Assistant Treasurer Michael McCormack, who was responsible for overseeing the census, denied that the national survey was “hacked” or “attacked”.
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“Four “Denial of Service” “hacking” attacks of ‘varying nature and severity”, were directed at the site, before the ABS pulled the plug.
“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”.
He accepted there was no suggestion people’s personal data had been hacked, but described it as a “major security failure”.
Small Business minister Michael McCormack and Australian Statistician David Kalisch on Wednesday. “And every time there is more of that conjecture, it increases the profile of the site”.
The Turnbull government has defended its handling of the bungled census, congratulating the Australian Bureau of Statistics on taking a “cautious” approach to protecting Australians’ data.
Mr MacGibbon said it was “not abnormal” for Australian Government services to be subject to denial of service attempts, but cited the failed service as one of the main defences against such attempts.
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.
When asked if the attack’s goal was to sabotage the census, Kasich said, “We believe so”.
There’s a risk that people will “have greater reservations now about completing the survey” and the data garnered will be incomplete, he said.
The source of the attack is being investigated by the Australian Signals Directorate.
“And the public will be advised as soon as that is done”.
But in the meantime, the government and ABS urged everyone to jump online on Census night and fill out the form.
“Following, and because of this, there was a hardware failure”, Mr McCormack said, saying the ABS took a very cautious approach in shutting down the site.
“This is based on the advice we have”.
Digital Rights Watch has called for an “independent inquiry” into the handling of the Census.
However, in a statement released after the incident, McCormack did not address the calls and instead reassured Australians who were unable to submit their census forms that they would be not fined.
There were numerous reports in the early evening of the census website crashing or failing to load.
“The attack was no more significant than the types of attacks we would see all the time against Australian government systems”.
Labor frontbencher Andrew Leigh said the Coalition should not “pass the buck” for the census to the ABS.
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Conducting most of the survey online was estimated to save 100 million Australian dollars ($76 million).
