UKIP website hit by denial of service attack

The following update on the case of the missing UKIP website has been sent out this evening ...

Since last Wednesday, the UKIP web server has been under a sustained demand on server attack, believed to be from abroad. While the site was situated on a static server the host providers were able to combat this effectively and after a spike on Friday, it seemed to have subsided.

We had already planned to migrate our new site to a new server on Monday evening and as we went ahead with that, the attacks began again, bringing the site down. We are working with the new hosts and our developers to fix the issue and have reported the problem to the appropriate authorities.  We hope to be back live today with our new site.

A denial of service attack basically involves flooding a server with so many requests - in the case of a web server, for a web page or service - that it falls over.  Successful denial of service attacks are almost always done using networks of hijacked computers so that individual computers or even countries can't be blocked.  This is known as a distributed denial of service attack and is generally the work of criminal gangs or hacktivists like Anonymous. It's a sign of the seriousness of UKIP's threat to the EU and the British establishment that the party's website has been attacked because nobody goes to this much effort for fun.