A Timely Warning !

On Census night the server crashed and a vast number of people were not able to enter their Census details on line.   That was a rather predictable result considering that more people are now expected to be computer savvy and use this media than those still beavering away with a pen on a paper form.

Every one of the twenty-four million residents of Australia who are in this country on Census night need to be counted and this was undeniably the biggest test of a mass computer use yet to be devised.What is incomprehensible is the total lack of coordination and ability to provide a logical explanation of the problem when the service went down.

Users were urged to "keep trying "long after the service had been deliberately taken down and a litany of excuses was forthcoming, including the story that the Census had been hacked by foreign unfriendly governments.  Even now a mix of stories are still doing the rounds, but we are assured that the details we submitted were not put at risk.

This fiasco simply underlines the risk factor that the age of the computer has delivered to the world economy.   Every aspect of our lives is controlled in some way by computers and the way to bring about disruption to services is a war aim in just about every country on Earth.  A cyber attack is high on the list of priorities when any country tries to do harm to another and many cyber warfare units are eternally on standby with that aim in mind.

Computers are so integrated in every essential service that a disruption would stop the economy in its tracks.  If hackers managed to cripple the banking system - taking ATM 's and card payments off line - we would be reduced to whatever cash we had in our wallet or purse.   Should a computer attack bring down the electricity supply our world would come to a stop.   The reticulation on water and pumping of sewage would cease - and we could forget filling up with petrol at service stations.

We worry about a sudden nuclear exchange if a rogue nation decided to press the button, but an attempt to shut down a nations computers is a much more likely scenario.   We could not even be sure of the origin of that attack and one of the outcomes would be a total communications paralysis.

In the edgy world of espionage we know that certain competitor nations are constantly probing our computer systems by way of hacking teams trying to gain entry and secure secrets.  Our own cyber people are responding in kind and in the event of a cyber war there would be failures and successes on both sides.  What seems assured is that no nation has a sure fire defence in place to stop widespread damage should a serious attack take place.

That Census fiasco throws light on the suggestion that we move to computer voting at coming elections.   Will the servers ever be capable of handling the volumes that Census delivered and will we ever be free of interference from foreign sources ?

We might do well to plan a quick way to get finances, electricity and general services up and running in the event of a computer failure rather than fine tuning against a form of penetration that is impossible to control.

Perhaps that Census fiasco delivered a timely warning !