The bureau’s chief statistician, David Kalisch, said he chose 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”.
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‘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 volume and complexity of attacks is changing at such a rate that it is increasingly hard for security teams to keep up with the fast changing world of hackers and the threats they pose”. “It was quite clear it was malicious”.
The two million Australians who managed to access the site before it was shut down were assured that their private data was secure.
The debacle which derailed the 2016 Census did not appear to be a standard hacker’s distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack and was more likely a failure or oversight within the Australian Bureau of Statistics, a Wollongong expert has said.
ABS said more than 2 million forms were able to go through successfully before the disruption, which ABS’ chief statistician said were encrypted and safe. And many Australians had also requested paper forms.
Mr Turnbull would not comment on the troubled ministerial history of the census, which has had three guardians since September: Kelly O’Dwyer, Alex Hawke and now Mr McCormack.
Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security Alastair MacGibbon said the incident was not a defeat for the ABS, and the result of conjecture about the Census.
Australian officials have differed over how much of an attack a denial-of-service (DoS) attack really is after the nation’s first online census was temporarily shut down on Tuesday.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS), the government agency overseeing the census, said it is believed foreign hackers had deliberately targeted the website.
Later last night it said the site was still down and another update would be forthcoming today.
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. “It is humiliating when the government asks millions of Australians to fill out the census and the government can’t even get that right”, said opposition leader Bill Shorten. “The ABS has an unblemished record of protection of data and there has never been a breach in relation to census data”.
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In statements contrary to those made by the ABS, Michael McCormack, the minister responsible for the Census has said the Census website was not attacked on 9 August, according to the ABC.
