Hackers hit Labor ahead of poll

HACKERS attacked Britain’s opposition Labor Party for the second time in two days yesterday, bombarding its web services with malicious traffic in an attempt to force them offline just weeks ahead of a national election, party and security officials said.

The party said earlier yesterday it had “experienced a sophisticated and large-scale cyberattack on Labor digital platforms.”

But the attack was successfully repelled and no data was compromised.

Just hours later, the party’s website and other online services came under a second digital bombardment, according to two people with knowledge of the matter and documents seen by Reuters.

But Britain’s security agencies have warned that Russia and other countries could use cyberattacks or political messages on social media to attempt to disrupt the December 12 election.

Moscow has repeatedly denied Western allegations of election interference and a person with knowledge of the matter said an initial investigation had found nothing to link the Labor Party attack to a foreign state.

Britain’s National Cyber Security Centre, part of the GCHQ signals intelligence agency, said the attack was a distributed denial-of-service attack — a technique used by hackers to take down websites by overwhelming them with malicious traffic.

“DDoS attacks are a common form of attack used by a very wide range of attackers. Mitigation techniques are available and worked in this case,” the NCSC spokesman said.

The nature of such attacks often made it difficult to attribute responsibility to any particular group, he said.

Labor leader Jeremy Corbyn said the attack was very serious but was successfully repelled by the party’s defence systems when the digital assault began on Monday.

“But if this is a sign of things to come in this election, I feel very nervous about it all,” he said.

“Because a cyber attack against a political party in an election is suspicious and something one is very worried about.”

A Labor spokesman said that while the attack had slowed down some campaign activity, they were restored yesterday.

The person with knowledge of the matter said any Labor Party web services currently offline were not directly connected to the attack.

Britain goes to the polls on December 12 in an election called by Prime Minister Boris Johnson to try to break the Brexit deadlock in parliament more than three years since the country voted to leave the European Union.

(Reuters)