“It crashed because of a deliberate DDoS attack by fearful Labor goons.

“The attack was targeting the availability of our donation website and is not a data breach. No personal information, payment details, or supporter records were accessed or compromised.”

The spokesperson said that One Nation’s technical team was able to “kill the attack” and get the site back online.

However, while several other group pages and individual sites did link to, share, and amplify the hacking claim, the original post has been quietly deleted.

Cyber Daily reached out to the party at the time of the claims, but did not receive any response regarding any details of the alleged attack or how One Nation was able to attribute it to individuals with links to or affiliated with the Australian Labor Party.

Op-Ed: What likely happened

At the time of One Nation’s hacking claims, the party was enjoying a surge in popularity, leading to a sharp increase in private donations. Hanson claimed to have received millions of dollars from ordinary Australians – as of June 11, the party claimed to have received more than $2 million in donations.

As of the time of writing, that figure – at least according to One Nation – has ballooned to more than $4.8 million, with a goal of reaching $5 million before June 30.

While it is possible some form of malicious attack was responsible for what was no doubt a very real outage, the most likely cause was simply too many users attempting to access infrastructure not up to the challenge.

The effect is similar to a distributed denial of service attack, but without the malicious intent, and certainly not the act of “fearful Labor goons”.