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Visitors to www.finegael2011.com were this evening presented with this message, posted by members of the Anonymous collective.

Fine Gael website defaced by Anonymous 'hacktivists'

The leaderless online activists deface Fine Gael’s controversial new website, advising users that the party ‘censors their voice’.

Updated, 13.37, 10/1/11

FINE GAEL’S NEW WEBSITE was last night defaced by the anonymous hacker group ‘Anonymous’, which replaced the party’s new ‘tell us what you think’ campaign with a holding page telling visitors that the party was censoring submissions.

The site – launched amid much fanfare on Tuesday – had loaded as usual for web users, before users saw its content disappear and be replaced with a message issued by two members of the Anonymous collective, reading:

Nothing is safe, you put your faith in this political party and they take no measures to protect you.

They offer you free speech yet they censor your voice.

WAKE UP!

Furthermore, the page’s title changed to read: ‘The problem with politicians is they lie’ – a play on the party’s own message, that politicians talk too much and listen too little.

Examination of the site’s HTML code suggested that the malicious code appears on the site when it tried to display a user’s comments about how Ireland could be ‘fixed’, loading a string of JavaScript code which when made the Anonymous-branded page appear in place of the intended site.

The malicious code was housed on a server in Samoa, under a domain registered anonymously. The Anonymous group is more widely known for its occasional campaigns against Scientology, and more recently for orchestrating attacks on the websites of companies that had withdrawn funding services to the whistleblowing website WikiLeaks.

The site has now been removed altogether; visitors now are instead presented with a holding page which indicates that the site’s webmasters have temporarily deactivated the site entirely.

On Monday afternoon the party confirmed that the details of 2,000 of its users had been compromised by the attack.

Fine Gael’s ‘traditional’ site, which had remained active at finegael.org, also remains offline at the time of writing; this also appears to have been a reactive move from within the party itself.

On Friday TheJournal.ie reported that the new website was based on servers in Miami, meaning that none of the Dáil’s political parties had their main websites based within Ireland.

The site’s US-based hosting had also raised concerns within the blogosphere about the party’s compliance with the Data Protection Acts, and whether their transfer of personal data to a host outside of the EU was being done on a compliant legal basis.

The website was amended later in the week, allowing users to opt-out of party communications.

2,000 users’ details taken in Fine Gael website breach >

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10 Comments
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    Mute David Van-Standen
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    Oct 11th 2016, 3:20 PM

    Can’t help but wonder why they were not flying any sail, a reefed main or even a reefed head sail would have given them some forward motion and helped to stabilise the yacht, rather than bobbing around on bare poles at the mercy of the swell.

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    Mute eastsmer #IRExit
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    Oct 11th 2016, 3:42 PM

    @David Van-Standen: My guess is inexperience, they seem to have been totally dependent on the motor

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    Mute John Considine
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    Oct 11th 2016, 6:41 PM

    @David, on a delivery run they might have had only a minimum crew, as a forty-footer she’d need a few handy sailors. With one down sick they may not have been able to hoist a sail and tack or gybe it in the conditions. Look at those swells, you’d need to be experienced to go on the foredeck there.

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    Mute Chris Kirk
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    Oct 11th 2016, 4:51 PM

    Well done RNLI, many lives at sea would be lost without them……

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    Mute Upowthat Burke
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    Oct 12th 2016, 12:37 AM

    Sunday sailers out on tuesday

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    Mute John Innes
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    Oct 12th 2016, 12:33 AM

    Who wrote this? A 12yr old?
    If Courtmac RNLI received a Mayday from the Coast Guard it meant that the CG were themselves in imminent danger – as opposed to the sailboat.
    Next, you don’t ‘Tug’ a boat – You TOW it. The boat doing the towing is the tug!
    Of course it was at slow speed – anything faster would have damaged the towed vessel – even on a good day.
    And finally – Met Eireann don’t do Status warnings for vessels – those are for land-based dummies who don’t understand Small Craft warnings or Gale warnings which Met E issue for all craft in Irish waters.

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