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Highlights
- Earlier this month, the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) mentioned having defended last year’s digital census from about 1 billion cyberattacks.
- ABS took its first census digital service offline for almost 40 hours to avoid data breaches.
- This statement was made by ABS’ agency head, Dr David Gruen, in light of the most recent Medibank and Optus data breaches.
During the Melbourne Business Analytics Conference held on 11 October 2022, Dr David Gruen, the agency head of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, said that on census day last year (10 August 2021), the digital census system was targeted with almost 1 billion cyberattacks. He even highlighted that ‘billion’ is not a misprint.
Given the recent Optus and Medibank data breaches, Dr Gruen focused his address on ABS' approach to data security during the conference. The speech touches on the new data sources that have become available to the ABS, along with their usage to generate new statistical insights. Dr Gruen also focused on the expansion of integrated data assets.
Highlights of the speech
- A number of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks were made against the first digital census in 2016, as mentioned by ABS.
- Even though there was no data breach, the digital census service was still taken offline for about 40 hours as a precautionary step.
- Taking the digital census offline was seen as an inconvenience for those trying to complete their census online.
- Following these DDoS attacks, numerous inquiries offered multiple suggestions on how to improve things, all of which were put into practise for the 2021 census.
- A recommendation for the digital census service working alongside the Australian Cyber Security Centre (ACSC) was taken into account, along with involving the ACSC in all its important procurement choices for 2021.
- In the lead-up to the census, the ACSC was used to simulate several DDoS attacks.
- It also let ethical hackers assess their ability to attack digital census systems by conducting simulations that showed how ABS would respond to a problematic situation.
- ABS has taken serious precautions and adopted a multifaceted strategy, even though it is quite impossible to completely remove all cybersecurity concerns and risks.
