While the ABS’ description of the attacks as malicious and potentially foreign in origin may alarm those who successfully submitted the Census form before the website was shut down, it appears from the ABS’ initial reports that the attacks were focussed on disrupting the online system, rather than gaining access to personal details.
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McCormack then fronted the media this morning with Kalisch, saying there was no attack or hack, and the data had not been compromised.
The remarks by Michael McCormack, the minister in charge of the census, directly contradicted those by Kalisch and the agency responsible for carrying it out.
But that geo-blocking mechanism ultimately failed, government cyber security adviser Alastair MacGibbon said.
“Steps have been taken during the night to remedy these issues and I can certainly reassure Australians that the data they provided is safe”, said Kalisch. That led to an overloaded router and a subsequent “false alarm” on the system monitor, prompting Mr Kalisch to shut down the website at 7.45pm. Before Tuesday, officials had attempted to allay fears by boasting that hackers had never breached the Bureau of Statistics.
“I am informed by the ABS that a thorough process will be undertaken to ensure all households are counted as part of the Census”.
“A denial-of-service attack is as predictable as the rain will fall one day or the sun will come up”, Mr Turnbull said. The ABS expected a 65% e-census take up rate, which still works out at around 8.5 million – which means they were banking on around a quarter of people not doing the form on the night.
A clearly frustrated prime minister admits there were “serious failures” with the national survey, which was conducted on an opt-out online basis for the first time by the Australia Bureau of Statistics.
Most of the traffic was coming from the United States but that was not unusual for denial of service attacks, he said.
The Australian Privacy Commissioner has nonetheless launched an investigation into whether any confidential information was compromised.
“The Census is a very important document”, he said.
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.
“With the way that they run this website I think this should have been predicted, in my view”, he said.
“ABS Census security was not compromised”.
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“The ABS applied an abundance of caution and took the precaution of closing down the online Census form to safeguard and to protect data already submitted, protect the system from further incidents, and minimize disruption on the Australian public of an unreliable service”.
