Over 400,000 households have completed the online Census since the website was restored yesterday afternoon. The chief statistician of the Australian Bureau of Statistics, David Kalisch, says new security measures have been put in place in the wake of Tuesday's 'denial of service' attack and hardware failure on the site. In an interview with AM's...

Although fraud has been practiced throughout history, the advent of the internet has created new and effective avenues for targeting potential victims. Victims of online fraud experience substantial financial and other harms, resulting in annual losses in Australia of more than $2b, significant organisational disruption and devastating human suffering. Prior research in this area has...

Many Australians were unable to complete the Census on August 9 due to the Census website failing. The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) chief statistician has blamed a deliberate ‘denial of service attack’ for the failure. Like many government information systems, the Census site was outsourced to an external contractor: IBM. As well as writing...

Last night, the national census ended in disaster, after the Australian Bureau of Statistics website crashed, leaving millions of frustrated people unable to lodge their census forms. The bureau's chief statistician, David Kalisch, says the site was taken down after four separate cyber attacks from overseas. The federal government had earlier dismissed concerns about the...

This article recognises the need for new institutions for the governance of evidence-based policy making. It proposes a Parliamentary Commission for Science, an organisation that would be responsible forensuring the scientific use of evidence by government and fostering corresponding levels of trust in the public.