
Australian census website cracks after ‘malicious’ attack by hackers - mopoke
https://theconversation.com/census-website-cracks-after-malicious-attack-by-hackers-63734
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CarolineW
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.

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wyqydsyq
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.

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hhandoko
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.

