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IBM has blamed a supplier for causing the failure of Australia's online census, which went offline on the very night millions of households were required to describe their disposition.
Big Blue's submission (PDF) to Australia's Standing Committees on Economics, which is conducting an Inquiry into the Preparation, Administration and Management of the 2016 Census by The Australian Bureau of Statistics puts the blame for the failure at the feet of a company called NextGen Networks.
IBM does so because it says it devised a distributed denial of service (DDoS) prevention plan called "Island Australia" that involved "blocking or diverting international traffic intended for the eCensus site before it reaches the site, while leaving the system free to continue to process domestic traffic."
"This method was chosen because the primary risk of DDoS attacks of sufficient size to disrupt site availability was considered to be from foreign sources."
IBM's submission says two carriers were chosen to bring traffic to the Census site, Telstra and NextGen. Both were informed about "Island Australia" and how to implement it. But come Census day, IBM says "a Singapore link operated by one of NextGen's upstream suppliers (Vocus Communications or Vocus) had not been closed off and this was the route through which the attack traffic had entered the NextGen link to the eCensus site."
Big Blue's document says Vocus 'fessed up to the error on Census night.
[...] In a delicious irony, NextGen's submission also notes its recent acquisition by none other than Vocus. Which will make life interesting at the first all-hands meeting once the acquisition closes.
The Inquiry will issue a report on November 24th. The Register's Australian outpost has laid in copious stocks of popcorn ahead of the report's release.
Previous reporting:
Australian Census: Hacked or Just Ill-Prepared?
(Score: 2, Interesting) by bug1 on Saturday October 22 2016, @01:48PM
"Vocus does not agree that the fourth DDoS attack was the cause of the site becoming unresponsive. The fourth attack comprised of attack traffic which peaked at 563Mbps which is not considered significant in the industry, and lasted 14 minutes. See report from Arbor Networks which indicates that it is materially below the mean attack size (https://www.arbornetworks.com/images/documents/WISR2016_EN_Web.pdf)."
"The cause of the census website being unreachable was IBM employee’s falsely identifying normal traffic patterns as data exfiltration, and manually turning off their Internet gateway routers"
"Vocus was not, at any time prior to 9 August 2016, invited to participate in any testing of IBM's DDoS mitigation strategy, or given any detail of what testing was undertaken. In fact, Vocus was not informed of IBM’s DDoS mitigation strategy, Island Australia or its specific requirements, until after the fourth attack."
http://www.aph.gov.au/DocumentStore.ashx?id=9f58f27a-9b42-4de1-80f7-60e17edfb153&subId=414847 [aph.gov.au]