The DDoS attack made headlines because the census website stores every detail of Australian citizen and a data breach would have been disastrous. But the Australian government apparently wasted $10 million because two first year university students just took 54 days and about $500 to build a similar more hack proof Census website. Daily Mail Australia reports that Austin Wilshire, 18, and Bernd Hartzer, 24, created the entire census site during the Queensland University of Technology’s Code Network Winter hack-a-thon at the weekend.
Wilshire said that while the original ABS Census site was load tested to handle 1 million page loads per hour and cost Australian government about $10 million, their cheaper $500 alternative was tested to cope with four million page loads an hour. That is four times better than what Australian government managed. ‘We made something that was really simple because it didn’t need to be complex,’ Mr Hartzer told Daily Mail Australia. ‘We were able to work without a lot of limitations, that the people who made the Census website would have had tons of,’ the 24-year-old added. It was no surprise that Hartzer and Wilshire’s $500 census website won first place at their first hack-a-thon, competitions which are put on my Code Network, a student organisation based out of QUT.
