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ABC News
ABC News
Politics
Anna Henderson and Jessica Haynes

Was the minister responsible for the census hacked?

Michael McCormack (L) spent the day dealing with #CensusFail fallout.

The minister responsible for the botched online census appears to have been subject to hacking on his own website.

Michael McCormack spent Wednesday morning defending the Government's handling of the census rollout, after the site was shut down following a series of "denial of service" cyber attacks on Tuesday night.

An errant link labelled "gay sex" was spotted on Mr McCormack's official website on Wednesday afternoon.

It hyperlinked to what appeared to be a Polish finance company's website.

Shortly after the ABC contacted his office about the link, Mr McCormack's website was listed as "down for maintenance".

Today he defended the census website being shut down while thousands of Australians attempted to log in and said it was not an attack or hack.

"A denial of service is an attempt to block people from accessing a website," he said.

"No census data was compromised and no data was lost."

The ABC has contacted Mr McCormack's office for comment.

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