WikiLeaks Party suffers denial of service attack

A hacktivist and public WikiLeaks critic has taken credit for a denial of service attack that took down the WikiLeaks Party website this afternoon.

The registered Australian political party acknowledged on Twitter that an attack had happened shortly after a spokeswoman denied the website's outage was due to anything malicious.

The site has been down for about 15 minutes as of this writing, but browsers can still access a static version of the website provided via Cloudflare. A WikiLeaks party spokeswoman told Computerworld Australia that the site would return shortly.

The Jester (@th3j35t3r) took credit for the site's outage on Twitter, writing: “TANGO DOWN - Wikileaks Political Party site in AUS. For grooming US gov employees & contractors into treason."

The attack came in the wake of the official launch of the new political party, which will stand six Senate candidates in the federal election, including WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The Jester has previously launched denial of service attacks against the primary WikiLeaks website.

When initially contacted for comment, the WikiLeaks Party spokeswoman denied there had been an attack.

“We’re not under attack as far as we know,” she said. Rather, the website had “a slight IT hissyfit” after receiving an “enormous amount of hits” in a short amount of time, she said.

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