Speaking to the ABC, head statistician at the ABS David Kalisch said the Bureau believed the attack was a deliberate attempt to sabotage the Census.
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McCormack has been one of the officials defending the #CensusFail on Wednesday, with Special Advisor to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security Alastair MacGibbon explaining it was in fact an attack because it forced the ABS to shut down the website for precautionary measures.
Or, a new “exploit” (software created to take care of a system’s flaws) could have been used, but not picked up or foreseen by the ABS.
Technology Partner Rob Neely said, “If nothing else, the attacks on the 2016 Census are a reminder of how effective targeted cyber campaigns can be at disrupting network services and public confidence in these services, regardless of the level of protection and forethought”.
Adding to the perception of chaos was the relative inexperience of Mr McCormack, who was elevated to the ministry after the election, and was the third minister in 12 months to take responsibility for the census, after Alex Hawke and Kelly O’Dwyer.
The website hosting the online form for Australia’s national census was brought down by a series of distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks on Tuesday, temporarily preventing some of the country’s citizens from participating in the population survey, which takes place every five years.
However, when the initial DOS attack came on Tuesday morning, NextGen was called in to geoblock traffic coming from outside Australia.
“The scale of the attack, it was quite clear it was malicious”, he said.
Small business minister Michael McCormack yesterday insisted that no data was compromised.
“It was an attempt to frustrate the collection of data”, he said.
And Kalisch appeared to back up that “there has been no attack on the information: It was an attack on the system – the information is secure and safe”.
While the first three DDoS attacks only caused “minor disruptions”, Kalisch said the ABS made the decision to take the site down just after 7:30 p.m. last night, after the fourth attack, to “ensure the integrity of the data”.
Experts pouring doubt on ABS claims the census debacle was a DDoS attack. Security officials would attempt to determine the source of the attacks, he said.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, who apparently managed to access the census site while it was still working, expressed regret for the inconvenience, but said the site had temporarily had to come down “out of an abundance of caution”. And many Australians had also requested paper forms.
But the ABS and IBM said they did not need it.
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The Australian Privacy Commissioner has nonetheless launched an investigation into whether any confidential information was compromised. Before Tuesday, officials had attempted to allay fears by boasting that hackers had never breached the Bureau of Statistics.
