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IBM To Pay More Than $30 Million in Compensation For Census Fail (abc.net.au)

Posted by msmash on from the price-of-failure dept.

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."

5 of 60 comments (clear)

  1. Sigh by ledow · · Score: 3, Insightful

    How to make next year's census even more expensive, no matter who supplies it.

    Lesson 1.

    1. Re:Sigh by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 4, Insightful

      IBM blamed one of its subcontractors for failing to follow geo-blocking protocol to prevent the DDoS attacks.

      What about not useing the big outsourcers to do work any more?

    2. Re:Sigh by OzPeter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      How to make next year's census even more expensive, no matter who supplies it.

      Lesson 1.

      Aside from the fact that the census is not run every year, I'm pretty sure that screwing up a census is going to cost a government way more than this fine. $30 million is chump change in comparison to national budgets.

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  2. Can we swap government officials? by GrumpySteen · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.

  3. Re:English Motherfucker by wjcofkc · · Score: 2

    Because English is a static language. It never changes a bit and has always been so and so it shall be. Right?

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