Census Website hit by DDoS attacks ABS claims (1 Viewer)

[BLIT2014]

The census website was shut down after being attacked by foreign hackers, the Australian Bureau of Statistics says.

"It was an attack, and we believe from overseas," chief statistician David Kalisch told ABC radio on Wednesday.


"It was quite clear it was malicious."

The site was targeted by four denial of service (DoS) attacks, he told the ABC.

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"The first three [attacks] caused minor disruption, but more than two million forms were successfully submitted and safely stored.

"After the fourth attack, which took place just after 7.30pm [AEST], the ABS took the precaution of closing down the system to ensure the integrity of the data," Mr Kalisch said.

"I can certainly reassure Australians the data they provided is safe," he said.

Australian Signals Directorate - an intelligence agency within the Australian Department of Defence - are investigating, but they indicated it would be very difficult to find the source of the attack, Mr Kalisch said.

An error message seen when trying to submit the census.
An error message seen when trying to submit the census. Photo: Liam Phillips
Mr Kalisch said so far it had been very difficult to work out where it came from.

Some IT and cybersecurity professionals speculated that a DDoS attack was to blame, in which hackers attempt to crash a system by flooding it use bots, or Trojan, accounts.

But a handful of Twitter users pointed to digital attack maps that showed no DDoS activity in AUstralia on Tuesday.


In the past Australian government websites have been attacked by Chinese hackers.

A number of digital assaults on the census website began during the day on Tuesday and were repelled.

But the frequency increased as the evening neared and many Australians trying to reach the census site after 7pm couldn't connect.

It was at this point the ABS said it began the process of shutting down the site.

Mr Kalisch said he believed the details of people - including Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull - who had managed to successfully access the site were secure.

"Steps have been taken during the night to remedy these issues and I can certainly reassure Australians that the data they provided is safe," he said.

The ABS released a statement about 11.30pm on Tuesday advising the website was unavailable.

Mr Kalisch said he expected the site would be back on line about 9am on Wednesday.

Mr Kalisch and the minister in charge of the Census, Michael McCormack, will hold a press conference in Canberra at 9am on Wednesday.

As an estimated 16 million people logged on to the census website on Tuesday night, they were met with error messages and told the system was "overloaded" before the website crashed.

The ABS had dismissed suggestions an overload could cause the system to crash earlier in the day.



The troubles began about 5pm on Tuesday, when people trying to access the form were stopped by messages including a "code 31" error, which said the request "could not be completed because a problem was encountered".

Late on Tuesday night, the Bureau conceded the census would remain down at least overnight.

"ABS & Census website are unavailable. The Service won't be restores tonight. We will update you in AM. We apologise for the inconvenience," the Census Australia Twitter account tweeted just before 11pm.

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Census Australia @ABSCensus
ABS & Census website are unavailable. The service won't be restored tonight. We will update you in AM. We apologise for the inconvenience.
10:59 PM - 9 Aug 2016
840 840 Retweets 391 391 likes
Australians who failed to fill out the census because of the hours-long website outage will not be fined, and have until September 23 to complete the survey, the federal government says.

Labor is demanding the Minister responsible for managing the census, Assistant Treasurer Michael McCormack resign over the embarrassing website crash, which the Australian Bureau of Statistics said hours earlier could not happen.

The census was plagued by a growing boycott over fears of potential security and privacy breaches.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics controversially switched to an opt-out online format this year and moved to store your personal data for four years rather than 18 months.

Although the names will be destroyed after those four years, the ABS created linkage keys which link names to other data they collect which will be kept indefinitely. The ABS says, however, that staff cannot get back to the name once it is destroyed from the other data via the key.

With AAP


http://www.smh.com.au/national/census-website-attacked-by-hackers-abs-claims-20160809-gqouum.html

 

[durrrrr]

 

[wannaspoon]

 

[RenegadeMx]

was defs the russians or the chinese

 

[mreditor16]

http://www.abs.gov.au/AUSSTATS/abs@...5239447C98B47FD0CA25800B00191B1A?OpenDocument

2016 Census – 9 August online form outage update

What happened?

On 9 August, the ABS was subjected to an attempt to frustrate its collection of Census data.

Census security was not compromised and no data was lost.

The events varied in nature and severity, and led the ABS to adopt a very cautious approach in relation to the 2016 Census online form.

There were three denial of service incidents during the day. A denial of service is an attempt to block people from accessing a website.

The ABS was expecting denial of service incidents and the protective measures in place managed the first three attempts with only very minor service disruptions.

The Australian Signals Directorate (ASD), a Commonwealth intelligence agency, was notified of this by the ABS.

Use of the online form increased steadily during the day and as at 7:30 the system was receiving 150 forms per second and this was well within the tested capacity of the system.

Just after 7.30pm, the following confluence of events occurred:


· A fourth denial of service attempt
· A large increase in traffic to the website with thousands of Australians logging on to complete their Census
· A hardware failure when a router became overloaded
· Occurrence of a false positive, which is essentially a false alarm in some of the system monitoring information.

At the time of these events, more than two million forms had already been successfully submitted and safely stored.
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 minimise disruption on the Australian public of an unreliable service.

Government and ASD were notified by the ABS. Reviews by IBM, ASD and ABS have confirmed that this was not a hack – no Census data was compromised.

Had these events occurred in isolation, the online system would have been maintained.

ASD are investigating these events. The ABS is working to restore service. We will only restore the service when we know it is robust and secure, and when the ASD provides clearance to do so.

The ABS apologises to the Australian public for inconvenience caused and reassures Australia that no data has been lost or compromised. The ABS has an unblemished record of protection of data and there has never been a breach in relation to Census data. The protection of Census data has and always will be our first priority.

What next for the Census?

Thanks to everyone who has completed the Census already.

There’s still plenty of time to complete your Census. We ask Australians to complete their forms as soon as possible. Fines will not be imposed for completing the Census after Census night.

As planned, households who have not yet completed their Census forms will start receiving reminders from next week. Census Field Officers will start visiting homes that haven’t participated in the Census from this weekend to ensure everyone can take part.

If you haven’t received your Census materials, please wait until the end of the week and then contact the Census Inquiry Service on or 1300 214 531. To order a paper form, please call 1300 820 275.

More information can be found at www.census.abs.gov.au

Following the Census, there will be a review of events, headed by the Government's Cyber Security Adviser, Alastair MacGibbon.

 

[baktiar77]

Just shows the incompetence of our government. They hired IBM out of all tech companies and after the Queensland payroll disaster who probably outsourced it some engineers in India with a project manager or two in America.