Sofia, September 9 (BTA) - Bulgaria's 2021 population and housing census, whose online stage began on Monday, is running into technical problems which make it practically inaccessible to people wishing to get counted by this method.

National Ombudsman Diana Kovacheva has received dozens of complaints and alerts about the online census system. The complaints concern the manner in which the process is implemented, suspicions of violated rights and justified questions about the various aspects of the project, Kovacheva's office said on Thursday.

Other complainants raise the issue about the participation in the census of the Bulgarian nationals who are absent from the country during the period of the census (September 7 - October 3). The online system cannot be accessed from an IP address abroad, but if such people cannot be counted by a family or household member, they risk incurring a fine.

Another inconvenience is the need to have a physical contact with enumerators even though the questionnaire has been filled in online, because they must collect the unique code that is generated after finishing the process. Complainants do not think this is a good idea in pandemic conditions.

Kovacheva has written to National Statistical Institute (NSI) President Sergey Tsvetarsky and to parliamentary Digitalization, eGovernment and Information Technology Committee Chair Ivaylo Mirchev to inform them about the complaints.

The online system came under a hacker attack just hours after it was opened for use. The attack was tracked to IP addresses in Sweden and was stopped quickly even by the first of four protection levels, the NSI specified.

A second hacker attack, originating from China, was reported on Wednesday morning, said NSI Vice President Diana Yancheva. The incident was reported to the State Agency for National Security and to the Council on Cybersecurity.

On Wednesday evening, the NSI warned in an official announcement that access to the Census 2021 Electronic System would be impeded or impossible due to a series of Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks, generating a traffic of over 250 Gbps. Teams of the responsible institutions are taking technical and technological measures to restore the services, the NSI said, assuring people who have done the census online so far that all their data are protected.

The NSI said it was too early to decide whether to extend the online stage of the census beyond the September 17 deadline. DT/LG//