Census website struck by a billion attempted cyber-attacks, Australian Bureau of Statistics reveals

Revelation that ABS fended off attacks in 2021 comes as Australia reels from ransomware attacks on Medibank and Optus

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As Australia reels from another immensely harmful" data hack, the Australian Bureau of Statistics has revealed it has fended off close to a billion cyber-attacks against the census.

Australian statistician Dr David Gruen told the Melbourne Business Analytics Conference last week that after the 2016 distributed denial-of-service attacks which led to the first digital census being taken offline by the ABS for 40 hours, every effort was made to protect the census and its data.

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