China's NSA HQ, in northern Beijing, is innocent, in this case, of hacking the Australian Census for 2016 Website (the cartoon below reflects the chaos).
All Turnbull needs is more bad news. This has indeed come to pass concerning the national Census of every Australian which mercifully is held every 10 yeas. BUT this was the first time the public were invited to mainly fill out their forms using a huge, "perfected", Census Website.
Over the last month Australian public opposition on privacy and surveillance grounds to a Census stored on computer database grew.
On Census Night, Tuesday August 9, 2006 bad become worse when, not thousands but millions of Australians tried to fill out their Census Forms online. But the Census website crashed when most tried on "Census Night" August 9, 2016.
China, always easy to blame, was blamed for launching a diabolical Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on Australia Census website. China's motive? Displeasure, over what an Aussie swimmer said at the Olympics, would you believe (I don't believe).
Two problems of fact seemed to be weakening this easy anti-China story:
1. the Australian Government is gradually admitting the DDoS originated in Australia, and
2. the attack by Australians then moved via US servers and only then crashed the Census website
back in Australia.
China's NSA or alternatively mass Chinese “netizen” action thus appears in the clear.
Confirming the accuracy of this sequence, once the government's contradictory statements are ironed out, Australia’s SkyNewsreported today (August 12, 2016) http://www.skynews.com.au/news/top-stories/2016/08/12/no-resignations-yet-over-census-debacle.html:
“Mr Turnbull told reporters [today] the attacks appeared to have originated in the United States, but the actors were not necessarily American.
'It is not very difficult to route traffic through another country using private networks and virtual techniques,' he said.
...Earlier on Friday Senior Minister Christopher Pyne appeared to confirm the disruption of the census came from within Australia."
CONCLUSION
So instead of an attack by "the usual suspect, China" it appears more likely that Australian citizens who were unhappy with computer storage of their private details, expressed their displeasure using a DDoS attack against the Census website.
I’ve been writing on SigInt and Cyber-warfare matters since 2007. See my 2007 article: "The fifth battle domain - cyberspace" at http://www.newsweekly.com.au/article.php?id=2999
Pete