Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull on Thursday blamed failures of the Australian Bureau of Statics and systems provider IBM after the 470 million Australian dollar ($360 million) national survey was taken offline on Tuesday.
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ABS boss David Kalisch, who again apologised for any inconvenience, told reporters he had been assured the system was “safe and secure” and Australians’ data would continue to be protected.
In the 2011 census, Australians were encouraged to fill out their forms in advance and come back later either on or after census night and hit submit.
An angry Malcolm Turnbull has signalled heads will roll after revealing measures were not in place to repel the sort of cyber attacks that left the census website in meltdown.
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. However, we are wondering if the entire Australian population accessing the website at the same time might look like a Denial of Service attack in its own right! We want to thank the Australian Bureau of Statistics, the Australian Signal Directorate and [Australian cyber-security chief] Alastair MacGibbon for their continued support.
He said the ABS decision to shut down the website to avoid any prospect that the DoS attack could breach its data was actually a “pro-privacy precaution”.
“There is no doubt there were failures in the system’s preparation for an entirely predictable denial of service attack”.
The Australian government and Australian Signals Directorate (ASD) have been informed of the issue.
The ABS said it was “subjected to an attempt to frustrate its collection of census data” on 9 August.
“I know people have said to me will heads roll?”
At a press conference in Canberra earlier on Thursday, Turnbull said the government’s primary objective was to restore the online site before determining what punitive actions would be taken in the wake of the event spiralling into a managerial debacle. “My prediction is that there will be some very serious consequences for this”.
“My first priority is to ensure that no personal information has been compromised as a result of these attacks”, Pilgrim said in a statement.
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Mr Shorten called for an independent Senate inquiry into what went wrong and why.
