UKIP website still under attack

The UKIP website returned briefly to the web yesterday with its new design but is back off again today.  The site has been subjected to a denial of service attack for days now and it doesn't look like whoever is behind it has any intentions of stopping any time soon.

It's particularly damaging at this point in time because the party is being inundated with new membership applications and they're all having to go through the call centre.  How many new members are being missed because the website has been taken down is anybody's guess.

The attacks are coming from overseas which you would expect with a distributed denial of service attack but where it's coming from hasn't been made public if it's known.  My guess is Bulgaria or Romania, neither of which are particularly happy with us and both have more than their fair share of organised crime gangs who will be keen to expand their empires into the UK when our borders are opened to them at the end of the year.

If you want to join UKIP you can contact head office by phone on 0800 587 6 587 (01626 831 290) or why not join through your local branch who will be able to keep your first year's subscription to spend locally and often offer discounted first year memberships?  If you are unable to find contact details for your local branch let us know and we will do our best to put you in touch with them.

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.

UKIP Website Redesign

The UKIP website has had an extensive redesign and is now a vision of purple and yellow loveliness.

This version of the website is excellent, the voter-friendly stuff is in the middle of the top half of the page and there are big friendly buttons on the right with good quality images.  The website not only looks perfect in Internet Explorer, Firefox, Opera, Flock and Google Chrome, but it also looks spot on in Skyfire on my Nokia E71, almost perfect on Opera Mini on my phone and even looks perfect on the naff built-in Nokia browser.

Just a couple of things the purple web pixies need to sort out:

• The blogs are inconsistent, they're on different platforms and all look different
• The layout "breaks" if you increase text size

UKIP website downtime

Since around late yesterday evening, the UKIP website and forums have been having some unexpected downtime. Anyone who visits the UKIP websites are currently being greeted with this:

There have been brief moments of uptime, but even then the website is incredibly slow.

UPDATE @ 10PM:
Everything appears to be back online.

By UKIP-Andy

Note:
This is my first post on here, and whilst its not exactly a excellent first entry, I wasn't aiming for that. Every little helps when keeping people informed!