Australian Census Attacked By Hackers

Following the news of a cyber-attack being mounted against the Australian census website, Dave Larson, Chief Operating Officer at Corero Network Security commented below.

Dave Larson, Chief Operating Officer at Corero:

“While the motives for this attack remain unclear, personal data is a highly valuable commodity for cybercriminals – be it for running phishing campaigns, to sell the data on the dark web or some other nefarious purpose. For this reason, accessing an online census database would be very appealing.

“That said, DDoS attacks serve many different functions and are often more complex than they first seem. In addition to causing downtime, they are increasingly being used to deliver malicious payloads, exhaust firewalls or distract security teams from something else that is happening on their networks. Either way, security technology is improving and is now capable of thwarting many of these attacks at the service-provider level, meaning the volumes of traffic delivered during a DDoS attack can be halted before they reach their targets.”