What was claimed
The 2026 census was hacked.
Our verdict
False. The claimed “hack” occurred in 2016 and did not expose users’ personal data.
AAP FACTCHECK - A decade-old news story is being used to falsely claim the 2026 census database was hacked.
The person who made the claim read out a news article about the census website being “hacked”, without mentioning the incident related to census night in 2016, not 2026.
There are no credible reports the 2026 census data has been hacked.
The claim was made in a Facebook video published on August 12, the day after census night.
"One final point that I want to make about the census and why you may not want to fill in the whole thing is because yesterday, the day of days, the census database was actually hacked,” the man says (timestamp 13 minutes 6 seconds).
"So, if you don't want your personal details, your name, your address, your date of birth, your income and all those sorts of very personal and private details accessed, then don't give it to them in the first place."
He then brandishes a print-out of a news article, headlined: “Census: Australian Bureau of Statistics says website attacked by overseas hackers”.
He goes on to read from the article, which says: “The Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) says it believes a series of hacking attacks which led to the census website being shut down last night were part of a deliberate attempt to sabotage the national survey.”
What isn't made clear is that the source article is actually the first eight paragraphs of a 2016 ABC News story about the high-profile technological failure of that year’s census.
The article states the census website was offline for most of census night, preventing thousands of Australians from completing their forms on the day.
ABS’s head statistician at the time of the 2016 census, David Kalisch, is quoted in the ABC News story as saying the site had been brought down by four denial-of-service (DoS) attacks.
Mr Kalisch departed the ABS at the end of 2019, as reported by The Canberra Times.
Australia’s National Cyber Security Centre describes a DoS attack as an attempt to overload a website or network to degrade its performance or make it completely inaccessible.
A parliamentary probe into the 2016 incident, published in November of that year, found the ABS took the website offline after it was crippled by multiple DoS attacks and other technical issues (pages 53-56).
However, the Facebook post’s characterisation of the 2016 DoS attack as a “hack” on the “census database” is also misleading.
The parliamentary inquiry found that “parties involved with either the events or the investigation” into the 2016 census failure were “all in agreement that no personal data was incorrectly accessed or released” (page 70).
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