Labour Party hit by “large-scale cyberattack”
The Labour Party has revealed that it has been the victim of a “sophisticated and large-scale cyberattack”
Labour Party officials reported the attack to the National Cyber Security Centre, stating that it was carried out by an unknown source on Monday.
A spokesperson said: “We have experienced a sophisticated and large-scale cyber-attack on Labour digital platforms. We took swift action and these attempts failed due to our robust security systems. The integrity of all our platforms was maintained and we are confident that no data breach occurred.”
The party said that their campaign activities had slowed as a result of the attack, but have since resumed operating at full speed.
In a message sent to Labour campaigners, Niall Sookoo, the party’s head of campaigns, wrote: “Yesterday afternoon our security systems identified that, in a very short period of time, there were large-scale and sophisticated attacks on Labour party platforms which had the intention of taking our systems entirely offline.
“I would like to pay tribute to all the teams at Labour HQ who identified this risk and acted quickly to protect us.”
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It is understood that Labour was the target of a distributed denial of services (DDoS) cyberattack on their digital platforms.
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A DDoS attack typically floods servers with requests, overwhelming them in order to force downtime on websites.
In response to the attack, Chris Boyd, Lead Malware Analyst at Malwarebytes said: “Attacks on politicians, political parties, and ukgov websites are a common feature around any election time, and attackers treat them as fair game in general.
“Most of the most notable attacks over the last decade or so were commonplace website defacements, or social engineering attempts, or crude DDoS attacks launched by individuals protesting various Government decisions instead of sophisticated nation-state attacks.
“Potential targets should be keeping their guard up, especially during this potentially divisive election with so many moving parts to it.”
The Guardian has reported that the perpetrator of the attack is believed to be “non-state”. The Labour Party has not yet announced where the attack originated from.
