ABS was already in the dog box with Australians because this year, the government statisticians wanted the full name of people for the Census.
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People officially have until 23 September to complete the census online, and the ABS has said people would not be fined if they did not do it on census night.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) collects census information every five years.
Bathurst Seymour Centre manager Terisa Ashworth heard negative feedback from her clients who had tried to complete the Census online on Tuesday.
Others, including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, have played down the attack and rushed to maintain that no data was compromised in the indecent.
“The census is an important tool to ensure the nation can plan properly for the future”, Bill Shorten, leader of the main opposition Labor Party, told reporters.
Australian Signals Directorate – an intelligence agency within the Australian Department of Defence – are investigating, but they indicated it would be very hard to find the source of the attack, Mr Kalisch said.
After the last one, they chose to switch things off to keep the two million already filed forms safe on their servers.
Mr Turnbull said while people had a right to express concerns about the security of their data, he assured Australians the information was safe.
Earlier, 2016 census manager Duncan Young said census day was going “very well” and online forms would save more than $100 million for taxpayers.
This year being 2016, the government made a decision to go paperless for the census.
There will be no fines for completing the Census after August 9.
The minister who said the #CensusFail was not an attack or hack on Tuesday night appears to have had his own website hacked on Wednesday night.
The source of the attack is being investigated by the Australian Signals Directorate.
The Bureau has announced that the names collected in this year’s census will be retained instead of being thrown away after processing, as in the past.
“This should extend, where appropriate, beyond third party claims for data breach to potentially significant first party losses such as business interruption or the costs of engaging IT and public relations specialists to mitigate the damage caused by these types of attacks”.
“After the fourth attack, just after 7:30 p.m., the ABS took the precaution of closing down the system to ensure the integrity of the data”.
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“Yesterday I noted that the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has been briefed by the ABS on the privacy protections put in place for the Census”, he said. Cyber Hackers setup banks of computers which emulate millions of people continually bombarding the website.
