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IBM To Pay More Than $30 Million in Compensation For Census Fail (abc.net.au)
IBM will pay more than $30 million in compensation for its role in the bungled census, Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull has indicated. From a report: The Prime Minister described the four Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks that caused a 40-hour outage inconveniencing millions of Australians as "utterly predictable, utterly foreseeable." "I have to say -- and I'm not trying to protect anyone here at all -- but overwhelmingly the failure was IBM's and they have acknowledged that, they have paid up and they should have," he said. "They were being paid big money to deliver a particular service and they failed."
The Prime Minister said "This was not a particularly clever attack or some great international assault on the census, this was a series of common or garden, utterly predictable, utterly foreseeable denial of service attacks."
After a decade of fear mongering by US politicians who want to relate every goddamn thing that happens online to a terrorist attack, that is such a refreshingly honest statement that I find myself envying Australia.