Australia’s Bureau of Statistics (ABS) thwarted nearly one billion cyberattacks on its systems during the nation’s census in August 2021, statistician Dr. David Gruen stated during the Melbourne Business Analytics Conference last week.
According to Dr. Gruen, after the 2016 distributed denial of service assaults that caused the first digital census to be taken offline by the ABS for 40 hours, every necessary precaution was taken to guard the census and its data.
“In the event, everything ran smoothly even though there were slightly less than one billion cyber attacks on our Census digital system on Census day, 10 August 2021,” Gruen stated.
Australia’s second-ever digital census was conducted from 28 July 2021 to 1 October 2021, and during that time the public-facing systems were under constant attack.
ABS collaborated with the Australian Cyber Security Center (ACSC), PricewaterhouseCoopers (PwC), and Amazon Web Services (AWS) to simulate attack scenarios and enhance its defenses. The officials also worked with ethical hackers to discover security loopholes in its systems.
“While it is hard to quantify what an attack is, in our case, these were connections that were obviously malicious which we blocked, either automatically or manually,” Gruen said. On census day alone we blocked 308,735 malicious connections, and on investigating these we blocked 130,000 IP addresses which were the source of this attack traffic.”
The ABS said it would continue to prepare for malicious cyber-attacks and has taken multiple steps to guard the data under its possession, which includes testing its systems with information security registered assessors accredited by the Australian Cyber Security Centre.
To bolster national cybersecurity defense, the Australian government has also passed a resolution to spend A$1.66 billion ($1.1 billion).
Earlier this year in March, the government put forward a A$10 billion ($7.5 billion) security spending package dubbed “REDSPICE” (Resilience, Effects, Defense, Space, Intelligence, Cyber Enablers) to address the national cybersecurity issues.
“There is an element here that cybercrime is growing really quickly around the world – there was an Interpol conference yesterday where the kind of police heads of forces from around the world got together and their message to the community was that cybercrime is now their main crime concern internationally,” cybersecurity Minister Clare O’Neil stated in response to the recent Medibank ransomware attack.