News article written by Corbett Communications. The statements made or opinions expressed do not necessarily reflect the views of Engineers Australia.
“Utterly predictable, utterly foreseeable” is how Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull described the Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks during the Census 2016 that involved IT giant IBM and the management of its contract by the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS).
Despite the census debacle and subsequent fallout, during September this year, IBM Australia scored 10 federal government contracts worth $7 million, according to ZDNet, for the Department of Defence, ATO, Department of Human Services and the Department of Industry, Science and Innovation, notwithstanding Queensland’s blacklisting of IBM after its billion-dollar health payroll scandal. There were also reports that by 31 October, IBM had missed a major deadline on an IT merger project for the Department of Immigration and Border Protection that involves a $500 million system.
The ABS “put too much faith in IBM”, Turnbull said, adding that lessons would be learned “very diligently”, but have they? The PM didn’t pull any punches to soften the blame aimed at Big Blue or the ABS over the 43-hour outage of the data collecting website in August this year.
“I have to say … overwhelmingly the failure was IBM’s and they have acknowledged that, they have paid up and they should have,” he said. “They were paid big money to deliver a particular service and they failed.”
While IBM Australia MD Kerry Purcell gave an unreserved apology for the census catastrophe, he admitted no heads had rolled over the incident, either with disciplinary action or sacking, even though the government requested multi-million dollar compensation.
In late November, Malcolm Turnbull claimed there had been “a lot of personnel changes at IBM as a consequence, so I suppose heads have rolled there” in an interview with radio station 3AW, but media reports said IBM had confirmed the situation had not changed.
And no one in the government appears to have felt the crack of the whip either. The PM’s cyber security advisor, Alastair MacGibbon recommended government execs and ministers go to ‘cyber boot camp’ to understand the fundamentals of security and how to talk about IT issues.
IBM’s reported revenue in October was in the neighbourhood of US$19.2 billion, making the AU$30 million cost estimated by the ABS to be paid by the company a mere cheque in the mail. The settlement between the government and IBM was negotiated commercial-in-confidence, so no details are available.
ALP shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh said the government needed to take responsibility for the debacle, with the Senate Economics References Committee report calling on the current minister overseeing the ABS, Michael McCormack, to take responsibility.
“Malcolm Turnbull said that ‘heads will roll’ over the census, but no one has been held to account and none of the four ministers in three years who had oversight of the 2016 census have taken responsibility for this stuff-up,” Leigh said.
McCormack, the Minister for Small Business since July this year, took over responsibility for the population data collection just three weeks prior to Census Night on 9 August. However, MP Alex Hawke had oversight of the ABS in the critical phase of the project from September 2015 until July 2016 while he was Assistant Minister to the Treasurer but perhaps focused on the long campaign leading up to the mid-year election.
The Senate Committee found that IBM had failed to check its system’s resilience and recommended open tendering be used in the future awarding of the contract which this year was worth $9.6 million.
Author: Desi Corbett