Well, in case you haven't heard, Australia just had its second five-yearly census that could be taken online. This year I decided to jump into the digital age and complete mine online.

Huddled up with my wife and bird around the warm glow of the computer, we took a small gamble and, rather than googling, typed in census.gov.au (well, I actually typed censis.gov.au either because I cant spell, or because the U and I keys are next to each other depending on who you talk to). When we got to the page my eyes were instantly drawn to the "protecting your PC" link, as any good security person would be. So I thought I would have a look at where the government thought we should go to get information on protecting our computers.

CLICK

The page looked very familiar to me, as well it should. It was (and is) the AusCERT website. I also noticed that the top of the "Most Popular Pages" column on the right hand side was Protecting your computer from malicious code. "Sweet" I thought to myself as my wife attempted to wrestle the computer out of my hands so she could do the census and get back to watching Castle.

So we filled out the census, lamenting that there was no opportunity to include my pet bird in the counting (a view mirrored by other friends as well) and sat back to watch Nikki Heat and Mr. Firefly himself solve another "real world" case.

The next morning I was curious to see what sort of impact the link had caused on our website stats. I was not expecting much as our site is running on a server with an Intel(R) Pentium(R) III CPU (this is being changed as we speak - or as I type) and it was still very responsive when I visited it on census night. I was slightly surprised to see the graph below when I opened the stats on our website. (Ok, so I didn't actually see the graph, just some numbers, but as the CSIRT Foundry has told me, you guys want a graph and not a bunch of numbers.)

So... Can you guess the date of the census from the graph? :)

Richard