“The information is secure and safe”, Kalisch said.
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The prime minister’s cyber security adviser Alistair McGibbon said a “confluence of events” led to the website failure. He said that at the time of the major attack, most of the traffic was coming from the United States, but that was not abnormal in denial of service because there were “an bad lot of systems” in the US. It’s not created to take data.
“If there is anyone in our target group or older people who need assistance with the Census form or anything like that we’re very happy to help them do that”, Ms Ashworth said.
Senate crossbencher Nick Xenophon said he would move for a Senate inquiry into the debacle as soon as the Senate met.
While the first three DDoS attacks only caused “minor disruptions”, Kalisch said the ABS made the decision to take the site down just after 7:30 p.m. last night, after the fourth attack, to “ensure the integrity of the data”.
Australia’s first online national census was in chaos on Wednesday after the survey website crashed overnight due to a possible cyber attack, raising concerns over the country’s cyber security and criticism of its slow internet services.
“It was an attack”, Mr Kalisch told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
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.
The Small Business Minister’s own site www.michaelmccormack.com.au appeared to have been hacked late on Wednesday afternoon with a link labelled “gay sex” appearing on the official site, reported the ABC. Reviews by IBM, ASD and ABS have confirmed that this was not a hack – no Census data was compromised.
Turnbull today said the “completely predictable” DoS attacks weren’t repelled because of “failures in the system that has been put in place for ABS by IBM”.
Once the router fell over, the ABS and service provider IBM chose to shut down the system to protect the 2.33 million forms that had already been submitted.
The ABS is now working with authorities to determine the source of the “denial of service” attacks.
Australians officially have until September 23 to complete the census, with some two thirds of respondents expected to use the internet rather than paper to complete the survey this year.
The statistics bureau shut down the site out of an “abundance of caution” to ensure the data already submitted by some 2 million Australians couldn’t be compromised, Treasurer Scott Morrison said Wednesday at a news conference with Turnbull.
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“What we’ve seen is Australians commit millions of hours in good faith for filling out the census and then find out that the census has been so bungled that it can’t even be processed”, he said.
