British Elections: Labour Party Suffers Second Attack
The UK Labour Party election campaign has experienced two sophisticated and large-scale cyberattacks by hackers on its digital platforms this week. Labour is reportedly suffering a second cyber-attack after saying it successfully thwarted one on Monday 11th November. The party says it has "ongoing security processes in place" so users "may be experiencing some differences", which it is dealing with "quickly".
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack floods a computer server with traffic to try to take it offline. Earlier, a Labour source said that attacks came from computers in Russia and Brazil.
The first attack was reported to the National Cyber Security Centre on Monday. A Labour spokeswoman had said the first cyberattack had ‘failed’ because of the party’s ‘robust security systems’ and that they were confident that no data breach occurred. Labour sources have confirmed it was targeted by a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack, one of the most common forms of cyberattack.
In a DDoS attack hackers flood a target’s online platforms with traffic from various sources, with the aim of slowing down access or causing websites to crash.
In a statement, Labour said: ‘We have experienced a sophisticated and large-scale cyberattack 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....Our security procedures have slowed down some of our campaign activities, but these were restored this morning and we are back up to full speed….We have reported the matter to the National Cyber Security Centre.’
Security experts believe that these types of attacks are usually carried out by a group of cyber criminals or a nation state. The last general election in 2017 was disrupted by the worldwide WannaCry attack, which hit hundreds of NHS trusts and GP practices, leading to thousands of appointments and operations being cancelled.
The NCSC subsequently attributed the attack to a shadowy North Korean crime organisation known as the Lazarus group.
Following reports of a second cyber-attack, a Labour Party spokesperson said: "We have ongoing security processes in place to protect our platforms, so users may be experiencing some differences. We are dealing with this quickly and efficiently."
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