Key Trade Union Website Under Attack
Cyber criminals have been targeting the Public and Commercial and Services union's website to coincide with one of its most important annual conferences in its history.
As delegates gather in Brighton the union is facing a sustained and well-organised denial-of-service attack that has seriously affected access to the site.
The attack has meant the website has at times struggled to cope with average hourly traffic 1,000 times greater than normal.
Given that the Union's Annual Conference has today debated the issue of industrial action over the Coalition Government's Cuts to jobs, education, health and safety, and pensions; to name but a few, questions as to the perpetrators and interest groups in attacking a trade union website will no doubt be aired over the coming weeks and months.
In the meantime, the PCS have set up alternative conference blog and Facebook pages in order to ensure Union members are not cut off from the Union's news, campaigns and activities.
Making a statement to PCS conference today, their President Janice Godrich, said:
"As of Wednesday 11 May 2011 the PCS website has been experiencing ongoing severe technical problems that have affected some visitors access to the website.
Following ongoing investigations, we can now confirm that these problems have been caused by a substantial denial-of-service (DoS) attack against the website. A DoS attack is an attempt to make a computer resource (in this case, the PCS website) unavailable to its audience by overwhelming the website with 'false' traffic. This traffic does not consist of legitimate visitors.
It is important to note that this has had no effect on the security of the information we hold, such as membership data.
With our web development company, we are doing all we can to minimise the effects of these attacks on our website and to ensure that normal service is resumed as soon as possible, so that visitors can find out the latest on our campaign for an alternative to government cuts and this year’s annual conference.
We thank members and visitors to the site for their understanding and patience during this period, and apologise for any inconvenience caused by this illegal and unprovoked attack."
The statement was also posted on the PCS Facebook page.
Given the activities and campaigns that Trade Unions in the UK will be involved with over the coming months and years, an attack on their website's benefits only one section of society i.e. the government and the civil service who run the country.
Of course speculation is one thing, and it is more likely to be the actions of cyber criminals trying to obtain personal information of PCS members, including their bank details etc.
Source: PCS
