Kalisch said that no data from the 2.3 million forms already submitted to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) had been stolen.
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“I can certainly reassure Australians the data they provided is safe”, Kalisch said.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the government agency overseeing the census, said it is believed foreign hackers had deliberately targeted the website.
The ABS has said that data submitted for the Census remains secure. 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 very bad lot of systems” in the US.
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.
Some IT and cybersecurity professionals speculated that a DDoS attack was to blame, in which hackers attempt to crash a system by flooding it use bots, or Trojan, accounts.
The opposition blamed underfunding for the failure, saying it would reduce responses to the census and compromise the results.
As of posting, the ABS website is still inaccessible and the resumption of the availability of the Census online form is still unclear.
Head of the census program Duncan Young said years of preparation went into 2016’s first digital census to ensure it would be easy and safe to complete.
In a statement released on Wednesday, Australian Privacy Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said he would investigate the cyberattack “to ensure that no personal information has been compromised”.
“There’s few more basic tasks to running a government than conducting a census”, he said.
“The site will be restored as soon as the Australian Signal Directorate and the ABS and IBM are satisfied that it can be restored with all of the necessary defenses against denial of service and other attacks are in place”, Aussie prime minister Malcolm Turnbull told the media.
Leigh also took aim at the “succession of ministers who have been responsible for the census, none of whom have grabbed the bull by the horns”, referring to his concern they failed to explain changes to hold name and address information for four years, up from 18 months.
The Turnbull government has defended its handling of the bungled census, congratulating the Australian Bureau of Statistics on taking a “cautious” approach to protecting Australians’ data.
Labor frontbencher Jim Chalmers said it was “pretty pathetic” of the prime minister to blame the ABS when the problem was a failure of leadership.
An estimated 13 million households were expected to take part in the census.
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“It was an attack”, chief statistician David Kalisch told ABC radio on Wednesday.
