David Kalisch, chief of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, stated that the website of the census was attacked four times during census night.
The Australian Bureau of Statistics, Australia's official statistical organization, has claimed that it was subjected to a deliberate and malicious attack from offshore, which is designed to incapacitate the 2016 Census.
When the official statistical organization demanded the people of Australia to be online on August 9 to finalize their Census, it appears the call was intercepted overseas too. Then the website that hosted the Census was subjected to a total of four Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, according to CNET.
The Distributed Denial of Service attacks are outlined to bend down a server with massive amounts of insignificant traffic, making the server inaccessible to the intended users. In the case of the Australian Bureau of Statistics website, it meant Australians were not able to load the website and present their forms.
Chief statistician Kalisch said in a statement that it was an attack, and they believe it came from overseas. And it was clear that the cyber attack was malicious. In which the hackers attempt to crash a system by crowding it with the software application bots or Trojan accounts, SMH reported.
The first three cyber attacks caused minor disruptions of the website and did not interfere more than 2.33 million Australian census forms from being submitted and safely stored. But during the fourth attack, the site was turned off after a gap in the system's security measures was discovered.
However, Alastair MacGibbon, Special Adviser to the Prime Minister on Cyber Security, stated that while government agencies routinely forecasted such cyberattacks without problems, the bureau of statistics was hit by the hackers.
MacGibbon made it known that there were a series of events that if lining them up end to end, it led to the unfortunate incident at the Australian Bureau of Statistics, according to NY Times.
Watch The Video Here:
