IBM Spreads Blame on eCensus Failure

As Senate showdown looms.

Having borne the brunt of criticism over the eCensus failure in August in silence, IBM Australia is now trying to foist blame on everyone from the Australian Signals Directorate to the service providers that carried internet traffic to the website.

Big Blue broke its silence on the eCensus this week with a contentious submission to a Senate inquiry examining the failure.

The company said it still “deeply regrets the inconvenience” caused to Australians on Census night, and that it “accepts its responsibility as head contractor” for the project.

But it used its submission to blame Nextgen Networks and Nextgen’s then upstream provider Vocus for allegedly failing to properly implement a geoblocking strategy that IBM had in place to counter the threat of a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Nextgen and Vocus countered that they had been kept in the dark about the geoblocking strategy until just days before the eCensus site went live, and that IBM ignored their advice to buy proper DDoS protection.

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