Census 2021 countdown: ABS taking rigorous steps to ensure no repeat of cyber attack on Census night

The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) is confident the upcoming 2021 Census won’t suffer the same fate as the 2016 event, where its website crashed on Census night following a series of cyber attacks.

Significant work has been conducted to ensure that on 2021 Census night, Tuesday, 10 August, every Australian, regardless of where they live, will be counted.

This year’s Census message is ‘Every Stat Tells a Story’.

Australia’s Census, held every five years, aims to count every person in every household in Australia – from cities to the bush – providing government, business and not-for-profit groups with crucial information about what services, such as schools, hospitals and transport, are needed where.

On Census night in 2016, millions of people were locked out of the Census website. The online form crashed after a series of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, which was then compounded by the failure of the supplier’s router.

The ABS took the decision to shut down the site for security reasons, and it remained offline for one day, 18 hours and 44 minutes.

Despite this setback, 4.9 million online submissions were received, along with 3.5 million paper forms. A total of 63.3 per cent of participants completed their Census form online.

Census executive director and national spokesperson Andrew Henderson said much has been learned from 2016, with the online Census 2021 system being rebuilt from the ground up.

“Everything is new,” he said. “Working with the Australian Cyber Security Centre, we’ve had independent assessments of the security. We even had ethical hackers come in – providing them with part of a code – to see if they could break into it. They couldn’t.

“We’ve been told our system is as good as it gets.”

However, Mr Henderson adds it will always be a continual race against cyber criminals in the ever-changing digital landscape.

He speaks to Census workers across Australia via video conference daily, and said the mood among the teams is upbeat.

“There has been a huge level of preparation leading up to this time,” he said, with much of the work starting when the last Census ended in 2016.

“I believe we’ve done everything we possibly can,” said Mr Henderson.

This includes providing more options for people to complete their Census forms.

In these COVID-19 times, Mr Henderson said people could fill in the forms at a time to suit them, either online, on a smartphone, a tablet, laptop or a paper form if preferred.

Extra Census support workers will also be employed in the field to help people, particularly in rural, regional and remote communities, as well as via phone and online services and public hubs.

Most households will start receiving instructions on how to complete the 2021 Census in early August.

More information on the 2021 Census is available here.