Donald Trump campaign website: New World Hacking claims DDoS attack

A group calling itself "New World Hacking" claims to have carried out a layer 7 DDoS (distributed denial-of-service) attack on DonaldJTrump.com, the official election campaign website of Donald Trump, the American presidential candidate. The site, which went offline on 2 December morning was back around noon Eastern Time after the group's "1 hour test".

While there is no official word so far, those who visited the site during the attack were greeted with an error message saying: "We're experiencing an unusual high volume of traffic at the moment. We're honoured that so many people want to show their support to help #Makeamericagreatagain !"

Speaking to Hackread, New World Hacking said they are against Isis, terrorism and racism. The group, although an associate of hacking collective Anonymous, carries out its operations independently. It has threatened to attack Trump's site again.

A member of the group said: "We targeted the Trump site because this guy can get quite racist. It doesn't matter to us how crazy he gets. Our member DOC actually attacked DONALDJTRUMP.com with a layer 7 attack and he plans to attack Trump's site later on again."

This is the same hacking group that earlier claimed responsibility for the massive DDoS attack on the BBC server. The cyberattack affected the main BBC website as well as other associated services such as iPlayer Radio app and iPlayer catch-up service. The group said it carried out the attack as a "test of its capabilities."

In a Tweet, the group said: "The reason we really targeted [the] BBC is because we wanted to see our actual power."

This is not the first cyberattack on Donald Trump's election website. In August 2015, Trump.com was attacked by hackers who posted a message praising Jon Stewart. In December, Anonymous attacked Trump's site after his Muslim ban speech.