“Cyber attack is a cost of doing business if you are on the internet”, he told ABC.
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Prime minister Malcolm Turnbull said the Bureau of Statistics shut the site “out of an abundance of caution” and would be reopen it once the bureau, government security agency Australian Signals Directorate and the systems provider IBM were confident that it was safe from cyber-attack.
Dr Leigh said the fury Australians felt at having to do the Census online, then finding it wasn’t possible, could skew results.
But Mr Kalisch wanted to remind Australians that they have plenty of time to complete the Census, to well into September.
“The ABS made a decision to turn that website off in order to ensure that the data wasn’t compromised”.
The minister in charge of the Census, Michael McCormack, will hold a press conference in Canberra today to front the media over the attacks, a massive embarrassment for the government. It was also stated that the ABS may simply have been unprepared for the volume of traffic it received on census night.
“The census is the biggest data collection exercise that we have and it determines allocation of resources across communities”, he said.
Pilgrim said the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner had been briefed on privacy protections and would continue to work with the ABS to ensure it was taking appropriate steps to protect personal information.
Do you think the ABS should have been more forthcoming about the Census problems?
“The Australian Signals Directorate are investigating, but they did note that it was very hard to source the attack”, he said. “Measures that ought to have been in place. were not”, Mr Turnbull told Sydney radio 2GB.
“Four “Denial of Service” “hacking” attacks of ‘varying nature and severity”, were directed at the site, before the ABS pulled the plug.
Kalisch said “a gap” in the ABS digital defenses had been fixed and the site would be reopened on Wednesday.
As of posting, the ABS website is still inaccessible and the resumption of the availability of the Census online form is still unclear.
All the people i.e. the Australians who were not able to fill up the online form because of the hours-long crash of the servers of the website, would not be fined by the government.
“I can certainly reassure Australians the data they provided is safe”.
Two million forms were submitted before the site became unresponsive, and no data was compromised, the ABS noted.
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Independent senators Nick Xenophon and Jacqui Lambie, and Greens senators Scott Ludlam and Sarah Hanson-Young were among those who said they would risk a $180-a-day fine by withholding their names and addresses.
