Posted on September 21, 2018 at 12:51 PM

Another DDoS Attack Hits The US Democrats

Cyberattacks against the Democratic congressional candidate continue, with the newest one taking down the candidate’s campaign website. According to cybersecurity experts, the website has gone down several times in the primary election season.

Another wave of attacks hits Californian Democrats

Nobody is quite sure when did the cyber attacks become a part of political campaigns, but it would seem that the Democratic party is suffering heavily because of them. According to new reports, the cybersecurity experts have discovered that another DDoS attack hit Bryan Caforio’s website in the middle of his campaign. The experts reviewed emails and forensic server data in order to determine the nature, effects, and consequences of the incident.

DDoS attacks work by bombarding a specific website with heavy site traffic, which the website usually cannot handle. In these instances, the website would crash due to being overload with information requests. However, it would seem that these recent attacks were not strong and advanced enough to actually breach the security of the site. Because of that, experts believe that all data remains uncompromised.

Unfortunately, the attacks did manage to block access to the website up to four times. One of these instances was during a big debate, while the other one was only a week prior to the election. While the campaign did not blame attacks for Caforio’s loss, they did point out that he failed to advance against Steve Knight because of them. He even came almost 1,500 votes short against Katie Hill, another Democrat.

Protection has little to no effect

The campaign tried to fend off these attacks and malicious actors through several different tactics. One of them even included the upgrading of the hosting service of their website. They even went as far as to add a special DDoS protection layer, but the attacks still managed to break through and cause damage.

Caforio himself stated that dealing with such attacks has become a new norm during office runs. He also complained that fending them off is taking the candidates’ precious time, originally dedicated to talking to voters. Interestingly enough, the Department of Homeland Security seemingly offered to help Caforio’s campaign with attack investigation. However, they never received a response.

The Democrat’s campaign arm, Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee, stated that these attacks are seen as a very serious threat. As such, they are treated accordingly. Additionally, they stated that, even though they don’t have any kind of control over the campaigns’ operations, they continue to support them. The support also includes providing resources that would allow campaigns to adopt the best security measures against all sorts of attacks.

For now, it would seem that this is not enough, as hackers and cybercriminals are infamous for their ability to find cracks in the defense walls. Still, every bit of protection helps, and for now, it would seem like that will simply have to do.