Australian Bureau of Statistics has made an official confirmation that it has defended its IT infrastructure from over a billion cyber-attacks. Dr David Gruen, a senior statistician, confirmed the news and added that the digital abuse on ABS was being carried since 2016, when a massive distributed denial of service attack led to downtime of digital census board for well over 40 hours.
Dt. David divulged the details at the Melbourne Business Analytics Conference and said that his mention of ‘Billion’ figure was not a misread or misprint. The statistician also stressed on the fact that it was hard for him and his team to quantify and figure out the attack. But confirmed that all the attacks were blocked or neutralized through automatic or manual software gigs.
Census Day is a big day for the ABS as it gets an actual count of the populace. But it is tiresome to the IT Staff, as they have to allocate valuable resources to block or mitigate about 308,735 malicious connections arising from over 130,000 IP addresses.
ABS, in association with the Australian Cyber Security Centre, is preparing to mitigate malicious cyber attacks with related software and hardware. It has also hired a security firm to detect any loopholes in its infrastructure and patch them before any untoward takes place.
Unidentified people familiar with the matter state that the Census board has taken precautions such as to segregate and store names and addresses from other sensitive and household info. It is practicing a procedure to delete names within 18 months of detection and all paper forms of evidence are also destroyed after 6 months of their official registry.
