Gadgetory

remember census night the night we were supposed to press pause and take stock of our lives as Australians on August 9 2016 after being live for just a few hours the census website went down and then stayed down for 43 hours it was less of a press pause and more of a eject the videotape and smash it repeatedly against the wall situation now the government has released two reports on hashtag census fail and here are five things we discovered from the wreckage turns out our government bureaucrats just don't really get cybersecurity so the PM's top adviser on cybersecurity says they need to be put in cyber boot camp he really said that turns out that first ignoring the problem then taking to Facebook to blame all those Australians that were going online to fill out their form was not actually a good way to engage with the public the ABS had a plan to deal with social media complaints the cleverly called yet ultimately useless social media crisis escalation matrix but they decided that only accounts with over 10,000 Twitter followers were worthy have been taken seriously so how did the ABS deal with even the most high priority of complainants they ignored them completely so here's what actually happened there was a DDoS attack but the ABS and IBM hadn't done adequate testing and couldn't really explain or account for the strange network traffic worried that your personal information was going overseas they took the census site down the ABS and IBM did ddos testing but for a total of ten minutes after the site was already online and finally turns out that giving Australians very little warning about plans to keep their name and address for the first time and to keep this information for four years and they're not really keeping the public informed about what went wrong turns out census fail was one of the biggest fails of 2016