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.
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On Tuesday night millions of people were unable to complete their census online because of computer error, and the ABS blamed four DDoS attacks by hackers. A DDoS attack floods a website with traffic until it cannot cope and crashes.
“It was an attack, and we believe from overseas ... It was quite clear it was malicious,” chief statistician David Kalisch told ABC radio.
Meanwhile the minister responsible, Michael McCormack, was telling a press conference “this was not an attack, nor was it a hack”.
University of Wollongong Computing and Information Technology head of school Professor Willy Susilo said his feeling was that the census was targeted and the ABS could have foreseen this.
“With the way that they run this website I think this should have been predicted, in my view,” he said.
“In my view it doesn’t sound like a real denial of service attack.”
This was because all activity apparently came from overseas, whereas DDoS attacks would use local “zombie” computers as well.
“It could be more likely that this error was from a human point of view, for instance the people designing this did not foresee it, that is one possibility.”
Or, a new “exploit” (software designed to take care of a system’s flaws) could have been used, but not picked up or foreseen by the ABS.
On Wednesday the ABS claims were being openly mocked, after a “digital attack map” circulated showing no unusual web attacks in Australia on Tuesday.
The ABS said the problem was not overload, contradicting the “very busy” error message users were receiving.
If citizens were still wanting further answers, bad luck. The ABS has put up the “closed” sign and responded to the Mercury’s detailed questions by saying “we will not be making further comment” until it was ready to announce the online portal was working again.