Data captured on its Web site is secure, even though it has been fighting a SQL injection attack for months, says the Democratic Alliance (DA).
Anthony Hazel, DA director of relationship management, says the party decided to shut down its site 10 days ago after the user experience became too unpleasant.
"It was eating up our data and planting rogue links," says Hazel. "We speculate it came from Russia, as a lot of links ended in .ru."
The DA has put up a temporary page informing visitors that it has been hacked and will restore access soon. In the meantime, it calls on those who want to receive newsletters to resubmit their names and e-mail addresses on the temporary site.
Hazel says these details are not being fed into the DA's database at the backend, but into a Google data collection tool, which is generally trusted to be safe.
In addition, he says data like journalists' telephone numbers would not have been compromised, as this was on a separate database, and not linked to the Web site.
According to Hazel, the DA was planning to upgrade its Web site, but this is still in the conceptualisation phase with World Wide Creative, and is about three months off.
The party will launch a temporary site in the meantime.
The old site, which dates back to 2003, was run by Pilotfish and DataPro, but Hazel is not sure which of the parties was responsible for overall security.
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