The Australian Bureau of Statistics shut down the site to protect data on Tuesday night after four denial-of-service attacks that came from somewhere overseas, chief statistician David Kalisch said.
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The statistics bureau shut down the site out of an “abundance of caution” to ensure the data already submitted by some 2 million Australians couldn’t be compromised, Treasurer Scott Morrison said Wednesday at a news conference with Turnbull.
“My office will continue to work with the ABS to ensure they are taking appropriate steps to protect the personal information collected through the Census”, he said.
2016 census website was hit by a DDoS attack only hours after boasting that its website would not crash.
“Measures that ought to have been in place to prevent these denial-of-service attacks interfering with access to the website were not put in place”.
“The census is the biggest data collection exercise that we have and it determines allocation of resources across communities”, he said. “And every time there is more of that conjecture, it increases the profile of the site”.
“From the scale of the attack it is clear it is malicious”, he told ABC.
Labor MPs vowed to take up the census failure with the government, which is yet to be officially sworn in.
Australia’s internet services rank 48th in the world, by average speed, according to the most recent State of the internet report by Akamai Technologies, an IT company specialising in internet speed technology. “We’re in a country with a doctrine of ministerial responsibility”, he said.
It was at this point the ABS said it began the process of shutting down the site.
“The Australian Signals Directorate are investigating, but they did note that it was very hard to source the attack”.
“And the public will be advised as soon as that is done”.
“This is based on the advice we have”.
Digital Rights Watch has called for an “independent inquiry” into the handling of the Census.
Several senators had said they would risk fines by refusing to include their names and addresses on their census forms.
Asked what the motivation of those who made the attacks might be, MacGibbon said it was “clearly to cause frustration” – which they did. Mr Pyne had accused him of being part of the tin foil hat brigade.
“This was not an attack, nor was it a hack”, he told reporters.
“For the Government, for the ABS to say this is not a cyber attack is a bit like Monty Python’s black knight saying that they just suffered a flesh wound”, he said.
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Those Australians – including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull – who did manage to successfully access the site last night are being reassured their private census details are secure.
