Russian hackers targeted Tabitha Isner website, says campaign

Brian Lyman | Montgomery Advertiser

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Democratic congressional candidate Tabitha Isner said Thursday that Russian hackers attacked her campaign website over the last week.

Isner campaign manager Megan Skipper said there were more than 1,400 attempts to break into the website last week. About 1,100 of those efforts came from Russian Internet Service Providers, she said.

“What they did is try to log in manually to get the credentials,” Skipper said in a phone interview Thursday. “They were just guessing at it.”

The campaign said the attacks were unsuccessful and that no information was compromised. But Isner’s campaign has increased its web security, and Skipper said they reported the incident to the Federal Bureau of Investigation’s office in Mobile.

Isner, a minister and policy analyst, is running against U.S. Rep. Martha Roby, R-Montgomery, in the 2nd congressional district, which includes metro Montgomery, Dothan and the Wiregrass. Emily Taylor Johnson, a spokeswoman for the Roby campaign, said Thursday they hadn't seen any suspicious activity on their website.

U.S. intelligence agencies have documented Russian cyber attacks during the 2016 U.S. presidential election, and foreign hackers have taken interest in Alabama. Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg told The New York Times in March that the social platform identified Macedonian accounts that tried to spread false information during last year’s special U.S. Senate election. Officials who worked on the Doug Jones campaign said they were aware of outside efforts to influence the election.

Kris Vilamaa, the website administrator for the Isner campaign, said they became aware of the attacks when their web hosting company reported a surged of traffic to the campaign website, “a good 10 or 12 times what we’ve seen so far,” he said. Logs showed that most of the traffic was coming from Russia, though he said there were also attempts from other former Soviet Union countries, like Kazakhstan and Ukraine. Vilamaa said he was “not overly concerned” about the attempt.

“The mechanisms are in place to stop it,” he said. “We’ve increased some of the security to stop it.”

Campaign officials didn't know the reasons for the attack and did not speculate.

But Isner in a statement called on Congress to improve web security, saying “Russian meddling in U.S. elections continues to be a real and immediate threat.”

Skipper called the incident part of “an alarming trend.”

“To see it happen to our website is something to be watching,” she said.