Census 2016: Malcolm Turnbull says national survey a ‘failure of the ABS’

PRIME Minister Malcolm Turnbull has promised heads “will roll” over the Census fiasco, with the site still offline days after it was first shut down.

The Census website remains down.

MALCOLM Turnbull said the Census failure should never have happened and Australians had every right to be angry about the fiasco.

The Prime Minister said millions of Australians were inconvenienced after the Census site was shut down on Tuesday night.

“This has been a failure of the ABS,” he said.

“We have inconvenienced or the ABS has inconvenienced millions of Australians. It shouldn’t have happened. I am not happy about it. None of us are.”

As the site remained down almost 40 hours after it first crashed, the PM assured Australians a thorough investigation is taking place into the debacle.

Mr Turnbull said the Australian signals directorate were currently looking into the issue and how to rectify it.

The PM also said denial of service attacks are absolutely predictable and were always going to happen, however it was clear the measures put in place were inadequate.

“That is the fact,” he said.

Mr Turnbull said there was some anomalous traffic on the night which turned out to be quite innocent and that caused the ABS to take the $470 million national survey down.

Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull assured Australians their data was safe. Picture: Rick Rycroft

“So the site was not crashed by denial of service. But there was what you could describe as a confluence of events which caused the ABS to make that decision,” he said.

“But there is no doubt that there was a failure on the part of the ABS and its systems provider (IBM)”.

A furious Mr Turnbull said heads would roll but which heads and when would be determined by the review currently taking place.

Speaking on 2GB radio earlier this morning, the PM admitted there were “serious failures” with the Census, which was conducted on an opt-out online basis for the first time by the ABS.

The ABS shut down the site at 8.15pm on Tuesday after suffering four “denial of service” attacks with the government moving quickly to assure people their data was safe.

However, Mr Turnbull stopped short of saying whether anyone would be sacked over the fallout and instead foreshadowed “very serious consequences”.

3d rendering, Australia, Indonesia.

“My calm demeanour on your radio program is disguising the fact ... that I too am very angry about this. I am bitterly disappointed about this,” he told 2GB this morning.

The PM said admitted measures should have been in place to prevent such attacks interfering with access to the website

The failure of prevention measures were compounded by hardware problems, he said — pointing to “big issues” for the ABS and IBM — which was contracted to carry out the census.

Mr Turnbull said he hoped the site would be back up and running by today as a review was undertaken by the government’s cybersecurity adviser, Alistair MacGibbon.

“The review and which heads will roll where and when is something that will follow,” he said.

As Australians were yesterday asking what went wrong, the government moved to reassure people that no data was compromised.

Mr Turnbull also encouraged Australians to take part in the crucial survey.

The ABS is yet to confirm when the website will be back online.

However a spokesman for Small Business Minister Michael McCormack, who is in charge of the Census, told news.com.au it was expected to come back online today.

More than 20 million people are yet to complete the compulsory survey.

ORIGIN OF THE ATTACKS

Mr Turnbull said an investigation would establish what went so wrong.

When asked by journalists who was behind the denial of service attacks he said they appeared to come from the US.

“The information I have today is that they appeared to be coming from the United States,” he said.

“That does not of course mean that the people involved or entities involved were American because it is relatively straight forward to be able to route traffic using virtual private networks and other techniques through the US.”

COMPUTER SAYS ‘NO’

Census Australia tweeted last night that it had published an update on its website and work was being done to restore the service.

Latest 2016 Census online form update. A further update will be provided tomorrow. https://t.co/JPQsc36tWj

— Census Australia (@ABSCensus) August 10, 2016

It later tweeted the site was still down and another update would be forthcoming today.

Those who try and log onto the site from mobile devices this morning receive a message saying try again in 15 minutes.

The message you might get logging onto your mobile this morning. You might be waiting a while.

In the latest update on its site, the ABS said the site had suffered four “denial of service” attacks which led to the closure of the site as a precaution.

The language is in sharp contrast to yesterday when it clearly called them “attacks”.

The ABS cited foreign hackers as being responsible for the crash, however Mr McCormack contradicted this and claimed the crash was not due to an attack or a hack.

“This was not an attack, nor was it a hack,” Mr McCormack said.

His claim came hours after ABS Chief Statistician David Kalisch called the events leading up the shutdown as “malicious” and “an attack”.

Both the government and ABS confirmed no data has been compromised or lost and moved to reassure Australians their information was secure.

The website crash happened on Tuesday night as most Australians sat down to try and log on.

Just after 7.30pm on Tuesday, a number of events sparked the crash.

Treasurer Scott Morrison and Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull moved to assure Australians their data was safe. Picture: Saeed Khan

The ABS said these included a large increase in online traffic, a router becoming overloaded, leading to a hardware failure, a fourth “denial of service” attempt, meaning a user was denied access to the website and a false alarm in some system monitoring information.

“Had these events occurred in isolation, the online system would have been maintained,” the statement read.

More than 2.3 million Australians had been successfully submitted and stored before the website crashed.

The census is conducted every five years, but the decision to conduct it primarily online and to keep the information for four years before it was destroyed instead of the usual 18 months heightened privacy concerns this year.

While the census focuses on people’s circumstances on August 9, forms started to be accepted a week before that date and will continue to be accepted until September 23.

Census website still down...... I'll try again in 2020 #CensusFail

— tim (@t___c) August 10, 2016

Census website still down, @ABSCensus have abandoned their twitter account. This is all very encouraging #CensusFail

— Aimée Lindorff (@insomniacscafe) August 10, 2016

Tried Census again tonight but still down! #CensusFail @malgordon @milesb want one of my T-shirts? pic.twitter.com/Uy0Xgw7fjh

— Trent Yates (@Trent_Yates) August 10, 2016

- with AAP