“After the fourth attack, just after 7.30pm, the ABS took the precaution of closing down the system to ensure the integrity of the data“, the ABS said.
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Kalisch said the cyberattackers hadn’t gained access to the data of the 2 million Australians who participated before the ABS shut the site down on Tuesday.
Australia’s first attempt to conduct a census online will resume on Thursday two days after it shut down due to system failures that left it vulnerable to cyberattack, the prime minister said.
“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. While the ABS encourages Australians to fill out the Census on a designated day, that’s not the real deadline.
The ABS had been expecting denial of service attacks and the protective measures already in place “managed the first three attempts with only very minor service disruptions”.
He accepted there was no suggestion people’s personal data had been hacked, but described it as a “major security failure”.
Turnbull stressed the “unblemished record” of the ABS and said, “What you saw was the denial of service attack or 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”.
The message from the online Census on Tuesday night.
Labor wants Michael McCormack, the minister responsible for the botched census, to resign and believes a rerun is not out of the question.
“From the scale of the attack it is clear it is malicious”, he told ABC. It has been working with the Australian Signals Directorate to identify the source of the attack.
Asked what the motivation of those who made the attacks might be, MacGibbon said it was “clearly to cause frustration” – which they did.
From official ABS statements, it is unclear if the last attack was more than a DDoS attack, and if the attackers tried to breach its servers.
He did not say what time on Thursday the census would go back online.
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.
“I repeat, not compromised and no data was lost”, Mr McCormack said during a press conference in Canberra on Wednesday.
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“The Australian Signals Directorate are investigating, but they did note that it was very hard to source the attack”, he said. Shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh said the government could not “palm off” responsibility to ABS bureaucrats, but stopped short of calling for Mr McCormack’s resignation.
