Trump's campaign website hit by Layer-7 DDoS attack

The same group that hit the BBC with a massive DDoS attack has also claimed responsibility for taking down Trump's campaign website for a one hour period on Saturday. After the attack, one member of New World Hacking (NWH), a sub-group of the larger Anonymous hacking group, stated that the group had carried out a Layer-7 attack, which is the most complex type of DDoS attack, targeting the application programme interface itself and mimicking real human behaviour, thereby making it all the harder to detect and combat. This fact, along with the usage of Amazon Web Services and the group's claim of a sustained 602 Gbps volume, if proven, would point to a completely new scale of complexity and destructive ability in DDoS attacks.

The official Election Campaign website of American Presidential candidate Donald Trump was taken offline by hackers who earlier claimed to conduct a cyber attack on BBC websites.

The group goes with the handle of New World Hacktivists (NWH) and associated with the hacker collective Anonymous but conduct its operation as an independent entity who conducted a layer 7 DDoS attack (What is layer 7 DDoS?) on the official website of Donald Trump forcing it to stay offline for half an hour.

Trump’s site is protected with Cloudflare DDoS service which was displaying the site’s archive version. Those visiting the site were displaying this following message,

“We’re experiencing an unusually high volume of traffic at the moment. We’re Honored That so Many People Want to Show Their Support to Help #MakeAmericaGreatAgain!”

NHW took the announcement to Twitter with statistics report on the donaldjtrump.com attack:

The group then diverted its attack on BBC’s official website but announced that it will target Trump’s site later again.

In an exclusive conversation with HackRead, the group said they stand against ISIS, terrorism, and racism. When asked what was the reason for targeting Trump’s site one of the group’s representatives said,

“We targeted Trump site because this guy can get quite racist. It doesn’t matter to us how crazy he gets. Our member “Doc” actually attacked donaldjtrump.com with a layer 7 attack and he plans to attack Trump’s site later on again”

CBS has also acknowledged the cyber attack. NWH earlier today claimed responsibility for the massive cyberattack on BBC’s servers on the new year’s eve. The DDoS attack also affected the iPlayer Radio app and iPlayer catch-up service.

This is not the first time when Donald Trump’s website was taken down. A couple of months ago a hacker defaced Donald Trump’s official website with a tribute message for Jon Stewart. In December 2015, Anonymous took down Trump’s hotel site against his anti-Muslim speech.

At the time of publishing this article, the target Trump’s site was restored and working online.