Australian Census Freeze Hack ABS

The Census Website Has Crashed And It Could Be A Malicious Attack

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The Australian Census website has crashed, causing chaos on the most important day of the year for the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).

Many frustrated Aussies have taken to social media to express their anger about logging on, mocking the fact the ABS promised technically competence securing user data amidst privacy scares.

An ABS spokeswoman said today that they were confident that the website servers were more than capable of handling over one million form submissions per hour. TheAge reported earlier that an ABS spokesman had confirmed the site could cope with heavy traffic, stating that plenty of reserve capacity was planned as a contingency. He said,

“There is plenty of reserve capacity to cope if more than 80 per cent of Australians choose to complete the census online.”

However, earlier today, there were calls from experts that a DDoS attack (short for Distributed Denial of Service) could be used by hacktivists to crash the system all together. A DDoS attack works by using robots to send enormous amounts of artificial traffic towards a website to overload it to the point of freezing. This is the same sort of attack that was used against the BBC earlier this year by a group calling itself New World Hacking.

Earlier today, QUT information security senior lecturer Ernest Foo told News Corp papers that the site was a prime target for activists. Speaking to the paper, he said:

“There is a possibility that it’s a target for people wanting to do something malicious”

The paper also admitted that if the site had gone through the appropriate testing, it was unlikely the servers would crash, unless a malicious attack took place. LifeHacker, says the Australian Bureau of Statistics’ servers were load-tested at 150 per cent of the expected usage levels.

The Census has been the subject of controversy due to concerns that the agency could collect s user information including names, email addresses and addresses and store them for four years, instead of 18 months.

Many prominent Australians are refusing to take part in completing the survey in its entirety, thus risking a $180-a-day fine by withholding their details. This includes former NSW deputy privacy commissioner Anna Johnston, Independent senators Nick Xenophon, Jacqui Lambie and Greens senators Scott Ludlam and Sarah Hanson-Young.

The ABS have made a huge effort to ensure the public that the personal information they are collecting in the census is stored securely, but the latest technical blunder and potential hacking of the site is obviously a point of concern.

That being said, Australians have until September 23 to complete the online form.

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