“It was an attack, and we believe from overseas“, he told ABC radio.
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But Australians who logged on to the census site Tuesday met with error messages, gray time-out screens and spinning beach balls.
“We wouldn’t do it unless we were able to safely do it, we have evolved it and we are confident”.
When we can of course. “But rather it was an attempt to frustrate the collection of Australian Bureau of Statistics census data”.
“The information is secure and safe”, Mr Kalisch said. Here’s what you need to know about the Census and why you should do it.
“No census data was compromised and no data was lost”. “Your Census form is a very important document”.
The ABS has launched a joint investigation with the nation’s defence intelligence agency into the assault, which ramped up yesterday evening as most of the population was going online to complete the survey. With the information of every household in Australia being submitted, it would have been somewhat of a treasure trove for hackers.
Labor MPs vowed to take up the census failure with the government, which is yet to be officially sworn in.
When it was reported on the 9th August that the site was inaccessible, the prevailing assumption was that the ABS servers were simply not up to the task to process such a vast amount of requests from legitimate users at the same time.
“I have been in constant communication throughout the night with the Australian Statistician, David Kalisch, in relation to this matter”, he said.
Australia’s privacy commissioner Timothy Pilgrim said he was investigating the cyber-attack “to ensure that no personal information has been compromised”.
The websites for the Census and the Australian Bureau of Statistics went down at around 8pm on Tuesday, with the agency saying on Twitter it expected them to remain down until at least Wednesday morning.
“The ABS shares the same concern about your privacy as privacy advocates and has an unblemished record of keeping census data safe”, he told reporters on Tuesday.
Those who cannot access the Internet can opt to fill out a paper version of the census form.
Last night, the Census 2016 website was shut down, leaving a ton of Australians in the lurch.
You won’t be penalised for forgetting to fill it in or for completing it late.
Australians have until September 23 to complete the forms.
“What we’ve seen is Australians commit millions of hours in good faith for filling out the census and then find out that the census has been so bungled that it can’t even be processed”, he said.
Good Question. The site was taken down at 7.45pm last night.
The Australian Signals Directorate is helping the ABS with an investigation.
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The bureau’s chief statistician, David Kalisch, said he made a decision to shut down the site after the blocking failure led to an overloaded router breaking down, potentially making data vulnerable to hacking during a peak period, and the performance monitoring system “throwing up some queries to us that we needed to investigate”.
