Australia launched its first online census this week but was quickly forced to shut it down after what the government said were multiple denial-of-service attacks, which purposefully inundate websites with automated requests to cause shutdowns.
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The message from the online Census on Tuesday night.
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.
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.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull said he shared the ABS’s “regret” over the inconvenience caused by the site being taken offline, but stressed that Australians’ data was secure.
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. We will update you in AM.
He also criticised the Coalition for leaving the position of chief statistician vacant for a year, saying he feared it would now blame the bureaucrats for the site failure.
“I’m not using the word attack, nor was it hacked”, he said.
This points to the data certainly being safe, but again, we’ll have to wait for more details.
“This has been absolutely hopeless and chaotic, and the census is a very important exercise for Australian public policy”.
The Turnbull government said it had become aware the census website had crashed and the minister responsible Michael McCormack has contacted the ABS for a briefing. “This was not an attack, nor was it a hack”.
The attacks are an embarrassment for the government, which earlier this year confirmed that the weather bureau, which reportedly owns one of the nation’s largest supercomputers, suffered a “cyber intrusion” in 2015.
The ABS shut down the census website on Tuesday night following a confluence of system failures resulting from apparent cyber attacks by as-yet-unidentified operatives.
Asked whether the attack had come from a state actor or a school kid on a computer, MacGibbon said the source was being investigated but attribution was always hard. In 2013 there were 2100 events record buy the agency admitted many more likely went unreported.
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The census is conducted every five years., but the decision to conduct it primarily online and to keep the information for four years before it was destroyed instead of the usual 18 months heightened privacy concerns this year. There’s a risk that people will “have greater reservations now about completing the survey” and the data garnered will be incomplete, he said.
