4 ms·

Australian census website cracks after ‘malicious’ attack by hackers

• CarolineW 10y ago
  The stated capacity of 10^6 submissions per hour seems utterly ludicrous - the sums shown in this article imply that the suppliers are incompetent. It will be interesting to see how the fallout from this is played.
  • wyqydsyq 10y ago
    Considering it was designed and hosted by IBM who are trying to recreate themselves as a primarily cloud PaaS company (see IBM BlueMix), I'd say it was a matter of IBM's engineers poorly configuring the scalability of the deployment, which I think also reflects poorly on their ability to service the cloud hosting market. ABS shouldn't have outsourced the entire project to IBM, they could have just developed the application in-house and deployed it to an autoscaling CE instance group on Google Cloud, they probably would have saved $7-8 million paid to IBM while also avoiding this catastrophic failure.
    • jazoom 10y ago
      GCE does not have an Australian data centre.
    • hhandoko 10y ago
      I don't think the cloud and/or auto-scaling would help here. Most likely this is due to poor architecture choices. Also, from what I can see, gov't departments normally outsource for projects and only ever retain staff for maintenance activities (i.e. keep the lights running). It's probably due to the way budgeting is done.
    • cyphar 10y ago
      It would almost certainly not be legal for them to host it on any servers owned by a private company. It's a national census, and they specifically are planning to store personally identifiable information for 4 years (imagine that I'm screaming the last sentence). Basically there's no way on earth it would be permitted for a government department to host the census collection on someone else's servers.