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IBM will pay $30M for its role in Census bungle

IBM

According to Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull, IBM will pay around $30 million in compensation for its role in this year’s online Census bungle.

The Prime Minister noted that the DDoS attacks that took down the Census website were not “particularly clever … or some great international assault on the Census”.

“This was a series of common or garden, utterly predictable, utterly foreseeable denial of service attacks,” he added.

Turnbull has attributed the bulk of the failure to IBM, which has been billed around $30 million for the outage. He also criticised ABS for putting so much of its faith in IBM.

The Prime Minister has confirmed that the next Australian Census will also be conducted online, as long as the Government and contractors learned from the failure.

While IBM’s managing director, Kerry Purcell, assured that no one would be disciplined or fired over the failure in October, Turnbull has noted “a lot of personnel changes at IBM as a consequence”.

“I suppose heads have rolled there,” he said.

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