Politically Motivated DDoS Attacks

[mouakter13]

If your site is successfully attacked, it will put your content out of circulation, which could cause problems for your users if they need to access information or guidance.

You'll also spend time resolving the issue, lose any revenue you may be earning from the site (whether from sales or donations if you're a nonprofit ), and your rankings may drop if your site returns a 502 error for hours or days.

Politically motivated DDoS attacks are becoming more albania phone number data common as cyber threats are increasingly used to disrupt the political process.

If your website is for a political party, candidate or organization, or promotes a specific political cause, then you may be vulnerable to attacks from people who disagree with your politics.

This will not come unnecessarily from their political opponents. It is more likely to come from outside sources who seek to disrupt political debate, block certain types of content, and use chaos to confuse and disenfranchise people.

The attack could be an attempt to make it impossible for people to access your content (see above), or it could be a more personal attack on the individual candidate or the organization behind the site.

This is different to a site that is overloaded due to spikes in traffic from the news cycle. I once worked on a political party website that was overwhelmed when the party manifesto for the general election was launched. That was the first election in the UK where electronic campaigning was significant and we were not prepared for the volume of traffic.

A DDoS attack, on the other hand, will be much sharper and abrupt, seeing a very sudden spike in requests, sometimes within minutes. This will look very different from a natural spike in traffic, which while it may be sudden, will typically take the form of a curve rather than a cliff.