As to 12.00 today 459 118 persons living in about 200 000 households got counted electronically. During the last three days regardless of the hitches around 100 000 persons a day got counted. Despite this fact, the rates are low, said the President of the National Statistical Institute in an interview to Bulgarian News Agency.
The online census did not run smoothly due to the attacks against the information website through which the system is entered, said Tsvetarsky and added that these attacks necessitated limiting the capacity of the system, which made registration difficult. He recalled that in the first days of the e-census there were Denial-of-Service attacks as the most powerful of them exceeded 250 Gbits per second. There is no attempt for penetrating the system and draining data from it, said Tsvetarsky and added that public perception deems every cyber attack as hacker one.
NSI is not an isolated island. The census system is part of the common information infrastructure of the country. If only one of the registers even for a single second stops its normal work, people who are getting counted exactly at this second will see that something got wrong. During 2011 Census all data which are now checked in other registers were provided to NSI in advance.
As the leading institution in the census, the NSI and I personally are responsible. I apologise to the people for the difficulties, thank those who got counted and I appeal to the others to do the same, further said NSI President.
According to him, it is normal to give some extra time for the e-census, at least to compensate for the first days when the difficulties refused many people to get counted electronically. However, the decision should be taken by the Central Census Commission and the government.
For the first four working days 18 260 persons called the census call centre, said Tsvetarsky and added that only for the last hour there were several calls that the registration with a certain e-mail address did not work. ‘The check is on a case-by-case basis and it turned out that people usually make mistakes with the e-mail domain – they write .bg instead of .com. There are people who try to register several times because they suddenly decide to write other e-mail address. Of course, the system rejects them because it recognises that it is the same person. Part of the problems are related to checking in the location of the place of residence on the map,’ described Sergey Tsvetarsky part of the difficulties of the citizens while getting counted.
