By Tara Bahrampour Tara Bahrampour Reporter focusing on aging, generations and demography Email Bio Follow April 1 at 7:00 AM With just a year to go before the 2020 Census, the U.S. government is urgently working to safeguard against hacking and disinformation campaigns as it perfects a plan to count about 330 million people largely online for the first time.
They plan to encrypt incoming information, scan responses for unusual activity and monitor social media to spot attempts to mislead the public. The bureau has bought up more than 100 census-related domain names so they can’t be used to create fake census sites, and it plans to aggressively push the message that completing the survey is safe and that being counted is beneficial to communities.
Disrupting a census is not unprecedented: When Australia put its census online in 2016, cyberattackers launched what experts call a Distributed Denial of Service attack, in which hackers intentionally overload online systems. The onslaught crashed a critical website, slowing the count. The bureau has systems in place to guard against hacks. After encrypting the data at two points in the process, it will store the data in its own secure Cloud environment through the Amazon Web Services’ GovCloud. It will continuously monitor incoming data, using an automated system that will look for suspicious activity, check information against existing records, and refer questionable surveys to analysts for follow-up.
Census Bureau officials say such activity will be detected as incoming responses are automatically checked against existing records; if a discrepancy is spotted, it will be flagged for human review. A research company that surveys the Web for signs of malfeasance said it detected some chatter about the census a couple of years ago, but so far has seen no evidence of a concerted campaign. That is not surprising given the survey is a year off. A more coordinated effort might not come together until later in the process, said a researcher at the company, which asked for anonymity because of the private nature of its work.
“It’s tough, for those who care about the census,” Dutta-Gupta said. “We have to be careful in not raising false alarms or concerning people more than they need to be, since trust is essential in ensuring a fair and accurate count.”
If we cant count people who are not here legally, how can we help them.
TRUMP AND GOP USING CENSUS AS A MEANS OF TRYING TO GAIN SOME KIND OF ADVANTAGE.
knowledge, i am here to learn.
and I know who to blame in advance! Putin!
Disinformation campaigns like this one? 😂