The party's leader and current prime minister Stefan Löfven pictured at the weekend. Photo: Nils Petter Nilsson/TT
The website of Sweden's centre-left Social Democrats has been hacked for a second time, and the IP address responsible was linked to Russia and North Korea, according to the party's IT provider.
The hack was a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, meaning those responsible disrupted the site to make it unavailable to users.
"This is serious. Citizens don't have access to our site, the heart of our election campaign, where the information about our policies is," the party's head of communications, Helena Salomonson, told TT.
The site was attacked at around 9pm on Monday, and was down for around six minutes in total, Salomonson said. The party has reported the incident to police.
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It's the second time in around a week that the Social Democrats, currently part of the ruling coalition with the Green Party, have experienced an online attack, after a similar hack when they first launched their election campaign. On that occasion, the site remained down for several hours.
"Denial-of-service attacks are quite hard to prevent," Salomonson said. "Now we need to look over our preventative measures again."
The IP addresses behind the attack were linked to Russia and North Korea, according to information from the party's IP provider, but Salomonson said: "It feels difficult to speculate about possible participants and motives."
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