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"It
was an attack and we believe from overseas," Australia’s chief
statistician, David Kalisch told Australian Broadcasting Corp
radio.
Kalisch said that no data from the 2.3 million forms already
submitted to the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) had been
stolen. "We have it at the ABS. No one else has it," he said.
The census provides a snapshot every five years of the living
conditions of Australia's 24 million people, detailing incomes,
religious and ethnic backgrounds, marital status, etc.
The minister responsible for the survey, Michael McCormack,
refused to call the online crash an attack, but rather a "denial
of service attempt" when the website was deliberately
overloaded.
He said the site was equipped to handle heavy traffic, but there
was a spike in visitors so steep that a router overloaded and
the website was closed as a precaution.
"This was not an attack, nor was it a hack, but rather it was an
attempt to frustrate the collection of Bureau of Statistics
census data," McCormack said.
As authorities scrambled to provide a cohesive explanation for
why the census was not completed for the first time in its
105-year history, some politicians and privacy advocates said
the incident vindicated their security concerns.
Some independent Senators boycotted the census because for the
first time it was mandatory for Australians to identify
themselves in the survey.
"It shows woeful disregard for Australian people's privacy and
data," Anna Johnston, a privacy lawyer and director of
consultancy Salinger Privacy, told Australian Associated Press.
The failure has also led to criticism of Prime Minister Malcolm
Turnbull's decision to scale back a A$38 billion ($29.2 billion)
upgrade of Australia's internet infrastructure, stopping short
of connecting homes directly to a broadband network amid cost
overruns.
Australia's internet services rank 48th in the world, by average
speed, according to the most recent State of the internet report
by Akamai Technologies, an IT company specializing in internet
speed technology.
Both Australia's Signals Directorate, an intelligence agency,
and the government-appointed privacy commissioner, Timothy
Pilgrim, are investigating the crash.
"My first priority is to ensure that no personal information has
been compromised as a result of these attacks," Pilgrim said in
a statement.
($1 = 1.3002 Australian dollars)
(Editing by Jane Wardell and Michael Perry)
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