Martha Roby Challenger Claims Russians Tried To Hack Her Website

MONTGOMERY, AL - Congressional candidate Tabitha Isner said her campaign's website received repeated hacking attempts last month, most of which were traced back to Russian. Isner posted on social media that more than 1,300 attempts were made to hack into her site by Russian IP addresses.

The tweet, posted by Isner July 18, showed a screenshot of the origins of the hack attempts.

"I was pretty surprised by that because I had bought enough bandwidth, enough hosting power, that it shouldn't be an issue," Isner said in an interview with Business Insider. "I knew something was up and I had my web administrator go look into it."

The Business Insider report said Kristopher Vilamaa, the Isner campaign web administrator, took a look at the traffic logs and found that a large number of Russian IP addresses had been blocked. There were also apparent attempts to break into the website from Ukraine and Kazakhstan.

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Isner faces incumbent Republican Martha Roby in the November election for U.S. House District 2. Roby won a runoff in July against Bobby Bright, after receiving fewer than 40 percent of the vote in the June primary elections. Roby, who received some backlash from the GOP for criticizing President Donald Trump, was one of the few incumbent Republicans to face a runoff.

When the "Access Hollywood" tapes were released revealing sexist remarks by Trump, Roby said she wanted Trump to drop out of the presidential race and said she would not support Trump for president, which weakened her support among Alabama Republicans and prompted more GOP challengers to enter the primary. Roby only received 39 percent of the vote in the June primary.

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