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So the Australian government opted to host this thing on their own servers

Where did you get that from?
Everything else I've read disagrees with that and says that IBM was hosting the VMs for the ABS.

That "everything else" can't be much because this comes from one of the linked articles in the summary.

The clarification here is that many people have been saying IBM was hosting the e-Census website. According to our source, this is not strictly correct. IBM provided a content distribution network (CDN), running on SoftLayer, for static content such as fixed text and images. This is similar to the services Akamai provides with clustered nodes distributed across the world.

But the actual e-Census application, which operates dynamically is not hosted by IBM. Our source suspects the application is being hosted on ABS' own systems.

http://www.cso.com.au/article/...

I still haven't seen any mention of evidence that there was any attack at all. Well, except in the negative sense, as in "Global DDOS sensors failed to register any attack".

From the server's point of view, what exactly is the difference between "a DDOS attack from within the country" and "ten million users trying to log on to the site within one hour"?

The whole point of ransomware is that you PAY MONEY to get your files back. If there was any chance that the victim didn't believe that you would return all the data, then they would not pay. If one person paid the ransom and then found that not all the files were returned, or that something else was affected as you suggest, then word of mouth and rumors would spread about that particular strain of ransomware, and then NOBODY would pay the ransom.... They would all just restore from backups (which is ideally what they all should do anyway). This would seriously reduce the bad guys' income. They won't do something that would so obviously affect their bottom line.

Uh, I guess you're not aware of the dozens of documented cases where the ransom was paid and the victims got nothing?

Like this: http://www.cso.com.au/article/...

Only feckless cowards pay ransom, and those people aren't deterred by the failure of other ransoms. They are cowards, cowards always pay the Danegeld.

"Also, Symantec has not revealed key information about the command and control infrastructure (CnC) used by the attackers to manage infected computers. Its technical paper highlights that the C&C used four transport protocols to communicate between infected computers and its command servers but, unlike similar recent reports from rivals FireEye and Kaspersky, Symantec has not revealed the IP addresses and web domains used by the attackers, which if known could suggest the origin of the attackers." FROM -> http://www.cso.com.au/article/...

See that quote & WHY I said what I did due to it (ran into it yesterday in fact): Article's of that nature, or the .pdf, MINUS lists of the C&C Servers used (by IP address for firewalls, or by host-domain name for custom hosts files) are USELESS to myself - why?

* THEY'RE NOT PROVIDING THE TRULY "CRUCIAL INFORMATION" NEEDED TO BLOCK THESE THREATS IS WHY, OMITTING THE C&C SERVERS THIS THING USES...!

(Pretty self-explanatary right there, as to my subject-line above...)

APK

P.S.=> Complaint on MY part? Absolutely - not directed YOUR way though (more to Symantec really for omitting that information for afaik NO good reason)... apk

If I remember correctly, I read that Macs are fire-proof. Where was it... can't find it. Ah, found: http://www.cso.com.au/article/428817/apple_removes_claim_macs_don_t_get_pc_viruses_/