According to Amazon Web Services, more than 13,000 malicious IP addresses were blocked during a successful Census 2021. The IP addresses were blocked to ensure that no breaches or interruptions were experienced during the Census. AWS stated that the company undertook extensive DDoS tests before the operation to ensure that all data would be secured. The organization also built a web getaway to ensure that each Census form was validated before being passed along to a processing environment.
The operation, which occurred in Australia, also consisted of contracting PwC to build a 2021 Census on AWS cloud in an effort to avoid what happened during the 2016 Census in which the organization experienced a series of small DDoS attacks and a hardware router failure. During this Census, IMB was running the operation. The service underwent significant testing to ensure that it could meet user demand at more than 2,000 times the expected peak workload.
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