[LINK] RFI: Census Site Implosion

[Roger Clarke]

At 20:57 +1000 10/8/16, Craig Sanders wrote:
>Blame the hackers!  Say they're from North Korea and the government can
>hide it under the national security rug.

Okay, North Korea's a safe catch-all bogeyman.

But it's the mentions of China that throw me.

Who dreamt that up??

Was it just the one random and not-well-informed 'strategic studies' person who saw a chance to get his company's name on national tellie?

(Oh, and Alistair McGibbon, who otherwise managed to get down to mainstream Australian English and rough metaphors, without actually being misleading, came up with a new meaning for BOTPA:

'The publicity over the last few days may have attracted undesirables to pull out the DDOS card' qualifies as 'Blame it On The Privacy Advocates').


My sense of it at the end of the day is that ASD might just be able to find enough evidence of some small-scale DDOS to spare the Prime Minister's blushes.  But it was small beer amongst the key factors of:
-   a greater readiness among Australians to use computers than expected
-   under-scaled infrastructure
-   excessive PR in the final hours (designed to counter the sceptics)
    resulting in surge(s?) of interest, and higher-than-expected peaks
    ('self-inflicted DDOS')
-   panic setting in at 19:30 when several things seemed to be going
    wrong at once, giving them the sense of impending disaster


>From a PR viewpoint, the scary thing is that they could have limited the damage if they'd just put up a page at 8pm saying something like:

'Your Census is under attack from <insert bogeyman here>.

'We've closed the site for the evening to protect your data.  

'Come by again real soon now, and all will be well'.


-- 
Roger Clarke                                 http://www.rogerclarke.com/
			             
Xamax Consultancy Pty Ltd      78 Sidaway St, Chapman ACT 2611 AUSTRALIA
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Visiting Professor in the Faculty of Law            University of N.S.W.
Visiting Professor in Computer Science    Australian National University