The
Labour Party has claimed it fell victim to a “sophisticated and large scale cyber attack” on its digital platforms.
The party said the attack had “failed” because of its “robust security systems”.
Labour added it was confident that no data breach occurred and had reported the matter to the National Cyber Security Centre.
A NCS source told PA Media the attack was low level and that there was no evidence of sponsored activity.
In a statement on Tuesday morning, Labour 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.
“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.”
In an email to party staff Niall Sookoo, Labour’s director of
elections and campaigns, said print deadlines for campaign leaflets had been extended to ensure there was no “knock on effect” on the party’s
election effort.
“As many of you will have experienced since yesterday afternoon many of the Labour Party’s campaign systems have either been working very slowly or have had reduced functionality,” he said.
“Can I apologise as I know how much you as campaigners rely on those systems.
“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.”
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.
Labour sources later confirmed it was a so-called distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack – one of the most common forms of attack – although they would not be drawn on who they thought might be responsible.
In a DDoS, hackers flood a target’s online platforms with traffic from various sources, with the aim of slowing down access or causing websites to crash.Related... How
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