Quote:
Originally Posted by rally
I find Michael McCormack's news release comments about the problem simply unbelievable.
He says “There was a large scale denial of service attempt to the census website and online form. A denial of service is an attempt to block people from accessing a website. Following, and because of this, there was a hardware failure,”
And then in the next sentence says “I will be clear from the outset, this was not an attack. Nor was it a hack but rather, it was an attempt to frustrate the collection of bureau of statistics census data."
Does the man actually understand what a Denial of Service Attack is - by definition its an ATTACK !
Maybe we should refer him to the same source most schoolkids use to complete their homework assignments across the world - Wikipedia
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Denial-of-service_attack
. . . so he can do his own homework before telling lies to the public to try and push this under the carpet.
But its much much worse than this - a DOS attack (as has been stated) is often either a cover or a part of a mechanism that is used to penetrate a system's normal securities - and of course he goes on to deny that there was any compromise - like he knows what even happened in simple terms let alone what actually really went on !
He is a fool to say an attack is not an attack !
Its laughable, except that its so serious.
But I must admit I think Marc is probably right too - their systems just could never cope with a majority of the population all trying to use it at the same time.
I tried about 100 times and gave up - I wont be using the system full stop, but I was also was never going to allow them to breach 110 years of legal intent and tradition of anonymous statistical information collection not to collect to names and addresses. |
A standard DOS attack will very quickly bring a server down to its knees so you'll eventually lose all vital services. SQL goes first then HTTP then BIND. In worst case scenario the DNS drops. The census site was timing out but always responsive and in most case redirecting to an internal page advising of the issue. Still is currently. Other services on the domain were and are still working fine, such as contact forms, etc... So the servers were still running. I reckon their database back-end might have took a hit with the number of requests. It's always hard on a system to balance resources between SQL and HTTP requests. Either way not really an attack. Michael McCormack should stick to politics.