Labour websites hacked in lead-up to UK election
Britain’s Labour Party has been targeted in a second cyberattack, less than a day after a “sophisticated and large-scale” cyberattack on its digital platforms.
The attacks interfered with party websites and slowed campaign activities, party officials said, flooding them with fake traffic in an effort to crash the party’s computer servers, weeks before a critical national election.
The first attack failed because of the party’s “robust security systems”, a spokeswoman said.
Hours later, a second attack was under way, but the party is confident no data breach occurred.
“We have ongoing security processes in place to protect our platforms, so users may be experiencing some differences,” a Labour spokeswoman told the Guardian. “We are dealing with this quickly and efficiently.”
Authorities told the Guardian that the attack does not appear to be linked to a state actor.
But foreign election interference has become a significant global issue since the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence said that Russian actors deployed misinformation campaigns and hacked Democratic Party computer systems in the leadup to the 2016 presidential election in the United States.
In Britain, Parliament’s Intelligence and Security Committee has prepared a report on Russian efforts to interfere with the 2016 Brexit referendum and 2017 general election, but the Government has not given approval for its publication and will not do so until after the December 12 election.
The move has drawn criticism from Labour officials, who say holding up the report is politically motivated.
Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn called the timing of the cyberattacks “suspicious”.
“If this is a sign of things to come in this election, I feel very nervous about it all because a cyberattack against a political party in an election is suspicious and something one is very worried about,” Corbyn said.
Former US Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton said the delay in releasing the report was “inexplicable and shameful”.
Hackers employed a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack on the Labour Party platforms, which floods servers with fake traffic in an attempt to crash them. Such attacks are common and cheap to mount, but vary in size and sophistication.
A week-long DDoS attack capable of taking a small organisation offline can be purchased for US$150 ($235) on the black market, according to Digital Attack Map.
The party alerted the National Cyber Security Centre, the United Kingdom’s top cybersecurity organisation, but no action was needed by the agency.
Such attacks have spiked this year, according to a Neustar report, and are growing more complex. But even if they’re successful, DDoS attacks rarely do much damage beyond disrupting service to the targeted sites, although even short outages can cost companies tens of thousands of dollars.