MP’s website sees cyberattack ‘traceable to China’, sending users to gambling pages
A former cabinet minister’s website has been temporarily taken offline following a suspected cyber attack which Sir David Davis condemned as “direct interference” with a Member of Parliament’s duties.
The Conservative MP for Goole and Pocklington claimed much of the malicious traffic “can be traced back to China”.
Sir David revealed in the House of Commons that the website had suffered a massive distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack, resulting in “142 million requests, consuming approximately 800 gigabytes (GB) of data” in just 24 hours.
The attacks are believed to have started last Thursday morning and initially redirected users to gambling pages from legitimate links.
Describing the incident, the former Brexit secretary said: “Last Thursday, my website, maintained by Ipsa (Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority), was compromised. Malicious links were added and redirected users to South-East Asian gambling websites – I think it could have been worse. We removed it immediately. It was restored but was later subject to a persistent distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack that could be traced back to China. This is not a minor inconvenience, it is a direct interference with a Member of Parliament carrying out their duties.”
A DDoS attack involves overloading a server or website with internet traffic from multiple sources.
On Monday evening, the daviddavismp.com website said, “Unavailable briefly due to scheduled maintenance. Check back in a minute.”
While the majority of traffic appears to be coming from China, Sir David’s office has detected a small number of hits from other countries and is cooperating with the website servers to prevent further incidents.
Addressing MPs on the issue, Deputy Speaker Nus Ghani said: “I do not think it would be appropriate to publicly discuss details regarding preventive actions and how members are supported to protect themselves against such cyber threats.”
He advised members seeking security advice regarding personal accounts and devices to contact the Parliamentary Security Department (PSD), and for parliamentary accounts and equipment to contact the Parliamentary Digital Service (PDS) service desk.
