The Florida Democrats’ website was redirected to the Russian-backed media group known as RT on Monday, and is now being restored.
RT is a Russian state-controlled international television network funded by the Russian government.
On Monday, Zac Weisz tweeted, “The Florida Democratic Party has been hacked by the Russians. Its website goes right to RT, the Russian state media website.”
At around 4:20 pm Monday, the website redirect had seized and it appears that a restoration is taking place.
Twitter user, Jeremy Redfern, caught the redirect and tweeted out a video, saying “Oof, @FlaDems.”
It’s not yet known what has caused this redirect, but political parties are no stranger to these types of cyber crimes.
The Democratic National Committee experienced cyber attacks that took place in 2015 and 2016, in which two groups of Russian computer hackers infiltrated the Democratic National Committee (DNC) computer network, leading to a data breach.
Cybersecurity experts, as well as the U.S. government, determined that the cyber-espionage was the work of Russian intelligence agencies.
Forensic evidence analyzed by several cybersecurity firms, CrowdStrike, Fidelis, and Mandiant (or FireEye), strongly indicates that two Russian intelligence agencies separately infiltrated the DNC computer systems.
The American cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike, which removed the hacking programs, revealed a history of encounters with both groups and had already named them, calling one of them Cozy Bear and the other Fancy Bear, names which are used in the media.
The Free Press has reached out to the Florida Democrats to find out the cause of this redirect and we will update this story when we have that information.
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