The Minister for Small Business, Michael McCormack, says the problems with the Australian Census last night were neither an attack or a hack. “It was an attempt to frustrate the collection of data,” the minister told a press conference this morning.

McCormack said the security of the Australian Bureau of Statistics was not compromised and no data was lost.

McCormack said a denial of service attack occurred at about 7.15pm last night. This was followed by a hardware fault when a router failed. A denial of service attack occurs when a computer system is flooded with connections that overload the system and prevent it being accessible to genuine users.

According to McCormack, the first denial of service increase in traffic occurred at 10.08am yesterday. An outage lasting 5 minutes occurred. This was repeated at 11.46am. At 11.50am, all international traffic to the website was blocked. This is a standard means of countering a denial of service attack. [Read more…]