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The Australian ABS Big Gov Big Fail — Census night crashes

Australian CensusThere are hours of entertainment today with the radioactive fallout from Australia’s “census night”. In terms of Australian drama, running an online census produces more laughs than anything ScreenAustralia is subsizing. The 2016 Australian CensusFail is the stuff of legend.

In theory, last night 10 million Australian Households were meant to log in to one site, and fill out sensitive personal details which the government would guard in perpetuity. We were threatened with 180 dollar per day fines for not filling out the form and told the site was secure and private and could not fail. The system was tested to handle a million submissions an hour which was supposedly “twice as many as needed“. But do the numbers — it was utterly predictable that five million households would try to fill out the form between 7 and 9 pm on the East Coast. By 7:30pm Australia’s first online census had collapsed, the site was closed. “The service won’t be restored tonight. ” As of lunch time the next day, it’s still down. h/t ColA, Dave B.

The ABS tells us proudly that “2 million people” were able to fill in the form. Bravo for the 20% success rate, eh?

This morning the embarrassed ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) tweeted that it was an attack:

@ABSCensus: We apologise for the inconvenience. The 2016 online Census form was subject to four Denial of Service attacks of varying nature & severity.

Australian Census, 2016The Head of the ABS David Kalisch, who earns a total salary of $705,030, said it was malicious:

“It was an attack,” Mr Kalisch told ABC radio this morning. “It was quite clear it was malicious.”

The Minister responsible must have twigged that advertising attacks on our sensitive national data was not quite the right message:

Small Business Minister Michael McCormack said: “This was not an attack, nor was it a hack. ““I’m not using the word attack, nor was it hacked,” he said.

Mr McCormack gave a detailed timeline of each “denial of service” incident, the first of which occurred at 10.08am yesterday when the ABS “detected a significant increase in traffic”.

So at 10am on census day the ABS was surprised by an “increase in traffic”?

When is an attack, not a hack, not an attack, and possibly not even a Denial of Service (DDOS) —  when 5 million people try to obey the government?

Map ddos attacks August 9th

Matthew Hackling, a cybersecurity expert, said on Twitter today that there was no evidence of a DDOS attack, with international data maps showing no suspicious activity in Australia in that time.

— Matthew Hackling (@mhackling) August 9, 2016

Census fail: ABS says hackers attacked website despite denials, after nearly $500,000 was spent on load testing servers, by Rod Chester.

The government has also failed to explain why, if the reason for shutting down the servers was to stop a DDOS attack, why the servers continue to be down today. The ABS this morning described it as a foreign attack, yet the ABS blocked traffic to international IP addresses at 11am yesterday.

People were already having fun with the Census before the debacle: There’s a site to generate fake names for people who didn’t want to hand over their name and address. As one tweeter said: “..why do they need our names to build the right number of hospitals?” As Chris Kenny: said: If they can fine me for not putting my name on it, surely they can just put my name on it.” If you are wondering how to fill out the census form (like most of Australia) then consider Topher Fields approach. He’s calculating the likely costs of civil disobedience, and calculating how long you can take to avoid answering.  Mind you, as Sinclair Davidson says: The government already has your name, address, tax file number, banking details, and browsing information.

It’s going global. A Russian guy in California who uses the @ABS handle has woken up to a storm of grumpy tweeters. He’s smiling, but at least one Australian suggested the nation should buy him some Tim Tams to say sorry. Seems fair to me.

UPDATE: A group called IDI claims it can provide data on all Americans for as little as $10 a head — it includes groceries, photos of cars, political donations. Instead of running a census it’s cheaper if the Australian Government just pays the Chinese for the data. It can probably get a bulk deal.

 #CensusFail is running hot

Back in Sydney:    Having wasted 45mins filling it in, I now want $180 from @ABSCensus for every day that I can’t enter MY data!

A Phazzlepotomus (@phazzles) August 9, 2016    By DDoS, you mean asking 24 million people to log into @ABSCensus on one night #CensusFail

Lord Wentworth: Invading your privacy is important to us, so please be patient. You are number 21,000,002 in the queue.

Peter Wu @pihao — How to engineer the perfect DDoS attack? Send out letters to 16m households telling them to hit http://census.abs.gov.au  on Tuesday evening

 

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