Labour hit by second DDoS attack in two days

The UK Labour Party says it has been targeted with a second cyber-attack in the space of two days. Both attacks are said to have taken the form of Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks, in which networks of compromised computers (known as “botnets”) flood a server with requests in an attempt to overwhelm and take it offline.

Describing the initial attack as “sophisticated and large-scale”, Labour says it has reported the incident to the National Cyber Security Centre and has issued assurances that its security systems ensured that no breach of data occurred.

A spokesperson for the party 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.”

Labour has not disclosed which platforms were targeted, nor who it suspects of being behind the attacks. However, reports have indicated that the party’s election and campaigning tools were targeted, while Whitehall sources said that initial indications pointed to a “non-state actor”.

Writing about the attacks, Labour Head of Campaigns Niall Sookoo said: “Every single one of these attempts failed due to our robust security systems and the integrity of all our platforms and data was maintained.”

Discussing the first attack, Labour Party Leader Jeremy Corbyn described it as “very serious”, adding that it was “suspicious” that such an attack took place during an election campaign. "If this is a sign of things to come, I feel very nervous about it," Corbyn said.

According to web records, the Labour Party uses Cloudflare to provide its DDoS protection services. Cloudflare claims to have 15 times the network capacity of the biggest DDoS attack ever recorded, which it says enables it to absorb any amount of data that may be directed at one of its clients.