Roundup: Australia's census possibly compromised by low-level "hacktivists": experts

Small-time, ordinary "hacktivists" are likely responsible for shutting down - and plunging into chaos - Australia's first online census, cyber experts have said on Friday.

The census website was attacked by a number of Denial of Service (DoS) attacks on Tuesday night, prompting the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) - the government arm in charge of running the national survey - to shut down the website.

The debacle prompted fears that private information might have been leaked or compromised, and on Thursday, the nation's Prime Minister said that "heads would roll" over the lack of preparation for the event.

On Friday, industry experts and insiders told Fairfax Media the attacks might have been taken out by low-level, ordinary hackers and not some sophisticated organization or foreign government.

Embarrassingly, the Australian government is still unsure of the source of the attacks, but according to Tobias Feakin, Director of National Security Programs at the Australian Strategic Policy Institute, the lack of malicious intent pointed to hacktivists simply intent on making a nuisance of themselves.

"My gut instinct is it's some sort of hacktivist group not at a terribly high level," Feakin told Fairfax Media on Friday.

"The most serious issue in my view is there was an apparent lack of strategies in place. This is all about Australia raising their game."

Meanwhile Gideon Creech, lecturer at the Australian Centre for Cyber Security at the University of New South Wales, said the attacks might have been carried out by hacktivist simply "because they could".

Experts agree the government dropped the ball on ensuring the security of not only the personal information of millions of Australians, but also of its own website and online infrastructure.

IT giant IBM was reportedly paid more than 7.5 million U.S dollars to host and secure the online census, which was shut down after just one in ten households had filled in the survey.

The website was reinstated on Thursday afternoon - almost two days after the ABS was forced to abandon the online event - however Australians have been reluctant to trust the software in the wake of the cyber attacks.

According to local media, just 341,626 census forms have been received by the ABS in the eight hours following the website's reinstatement at a rate of just 11 forms per second - well down from the ABS' claimed capacity of around 260 forms per second.

As a precaution, the ABS has used a geoblock to prevent users from outside Australia from accessing the website.

Late on Thursday, head of the ABS David Kalisch again apologized to all Australians for the stuff-up, and said the website was only reinstated once he had received an assurance from the Australian Signals Directorate that it was safe to use and secure from any outside threats. Endit