Massive artificially generated malicious traffic caused the difficulties in the first days in completing the electronic questionnaire. It became clear from the report by the National Statistical Institute presented to the Parliamentary Committee on Digitalization, E-government and Information Technology. NSI President Sergey Tsvetarsky was heard at the meeting of the commission.
The report says that there were a series of DDos attacks against NSI infrastructure while the most massive was of capacity 276.94 Gbps according to data by the Internet provider, and the traffic to NSI was 44 Gbps.
State e-Government Agency and General Directorate for Combating Organised Crime were informed in accordance with the established procedure.
In the beginning, after the start of the Census 2021 Information System, some overloading was observed and later there were also interruptions in the Registry Information Exchange System (RegiX) and impossibility for checking the data from the e-census registration form against Bulgarian Identity Documents Register. The situation was put under control with restraining the number of persons who register at the same time and increasing the resources at the Ministry of Interior.
The report makes it clear that the preliminary tests done for functionality and system loading and infrastructure monitoring were successful. Also tests for penetration into the electronic system were carried out, there were implemented monitoring systems, information management and security events management system. Reservation of data, servers and applications was provided.
‘NSI is not an isolated island and does not implement this task on its own. Our system is part of the state information infrastructure. That is, the case is evidence that one swallow does not make a summer. Thinking out of the box on a larger scale should be at hand so that reliable e-services could be ensured to all Bulgarians,’ further commented NSI President.
The Ombudsman Diana Kovacheva noted that a lot of citizens complained due to the difficulties. There was also a case that the e-census was available only from IP address in Bulgaria. NSI President answered to it that the census is not meant for the Bulgarians all over the world but for the people residing permanently in our country.
It became clear from the statements in the committee that NSI suggested that Census 2021 deadline be extended with a week. However, this decision should be adopted by the Council of Ministers.
