Hackers down House Democrats' websites

More than a dozen House Democrats’ official websites have been down for days, and the contractor operating the sites told POLITICO that hackers are to blame.

The outage is affecting the congressional sites of Reps. Earl Blumenauer, John Carney, Rosa DeLauro, Lloyd Doggett, Tammy Duckworth, Donna Edwards, Sam Farr, Tulsi Gabbard, Alan Grayson, Marcy Kaptur, William Keating, John Larson, Jim McDermott, Richard Neal, Ed Perlmutter, Jackie Speier and Filemon Vela.

The websites were hit shortly after Democrats ended an overnight sit-in to press for a vote on gun control legislation.

With the exception of Perlmutter, all of the affected lawmakers have contracts with a company called DCS to manage their websites. DCS builds websites using Joomla, a content management system that has suffered from serious security flaws.

“The sites were hacked,” Scott Ferson, the president of the public affairs group representing DCS, told POLITICO. Ferson said that DCS expected to restore site functionality “by the end of the week.”

http://www.politico.com/story/2016/06/hackers-house-democrats-websites-224904