Kendall Scudder


Senate District 2 Democratic candidate Kendall Scudder reported hacking apparently by Russians on his campaign website.
Scudder said his campaign “is complying with the FBI’s Internet Crime Center instructions after hacking activity targeted and breached the campaign’s website and domain URL.”
The campaign first noticed a problem in late March when warning messages popped up on Firefox and Chrome attempting to redirect visitors to another site pretending to be Scudder’s campaign website.
“My staff immediately took action to find the source of this error, corrected it, and restored access to the site,” Scudder said.
In April, the campaign received a Google alert that “hacked content” again was detected. The campaign’s webmaster followed instructions to remove the fraudulent files.
On Saturday, April 21, the campaign’s communications director saw the message again, so the webmaster performed an extensive search of the site and found fraudulent files that contained references to Russian websites and coding in Cyrillic.
As far as he knows, Scudder said on Sunday, his is the only Texas campaign website attacked by Russian hackers so far. He said he had no idea why he would have been targeted and wondered if others around the state had also been victims and just weren’t aware of the strike yet.
Scudder said his team pulled down the website on Saturday afternoon and are rebuilding it with additional cyber security. He said donor information is stored elsewhere, is safe and has not been accessed by a third party. Additional precautionary steps have been taken to protect that information.
Scudder is challenging incumbent state Sen. Bob Hall in a district that includes parts of East Dallas, Mesquite, southern Garland and eight counties east of Dallas that include the cities of Terrell, Sulphur Springs and Bonham. Scudder, who lives in Dallas, grew up in Sulphur Springs. Although he’s not one of the LGBT candidates running this year, he was raised by two moms.
While his website is down, his campaign Facebook page is active.

— David Taffet