{"id":43469,"date":"2023-10-20T15:28:49","date_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:28:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/startupsmart.test\/2023\/10\/20\/did-the-census-really-suffer-a-denial-of-service-attack-startupsmart\/"},"modified":"2023-10-20T15:28:49","modified_gmt":"2023-10-20T15:28:49","slug":"did-the-census-really-suffer-a-denial-of-service-attack-startupsmart","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.startupsmart.com.au\/uncategorized\/did-the-census-really-suffer-a-denial-of-service-attack-startupsmart\/","title":{"rendered":"Did the census really suffer a denial-of-service “attack”? – StartupSmart"},"content":{"rendered":"
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By Mike Johnstone<\/em><\/p>\n
On Tuesday night the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) closed the 2016 Census website. No explanation was given at the time, except for a message on the page saying \u201cthe system is very busy at the moment\u201d.<\/p>\n
This morning, the ABS\u2019s head statistician, David Kalisch, announced that the site had been brought offline by four distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.<\/p>\n
The minister responsible, Michael McCormack, later qualified these statements by stating the site was not \u201cattacked\u201d, per se. While this is a semantic quibble, it is accurate in the sense that a DDoS \u201cattack\u201d in itself is not an attempt to gain access or subvert information.<\/p>\n
The prime minister\u2019s cyber security advisor, Alastair MacGibbon, added that a number of technical issues compounded the effects of the attack, including the failure of the ABS\u2019s geoblocking system at around 7.30pm, which allowed the DDoS traffic to impact the ABS servers, hosted by IBM.<\/p>\n
However, it has also been pointed out that the ABS may simply have been unprepared for the volume of traffic it received on census night.<\/p>\n
So how plausible is the claim that the census was brought down by a DDoS attack?<\/p>\n