Britain’s Labour Party said on Tuesday that it was subject to a large scale cyber attack on its platforms, but the attempts failed with no data breach taking place. “We have experienced a sophisticated and large scale cyber attack on Labour digital platforms,” the party said in a statement. “We took swift action and these attempts failed due to our robust security systems.” The attack comes at a time when cyber tools are increasingly being used to take on socio- and geo-political foes, leading to a rise in events such as state-sponsored cyber terrorism.
Post the cyber attack, the UK Labour Party stated that while the source of the cyber attack has not been detected, general suspicion and the pattern of the attack does not point toward state-sponsored threat actors. As of now, it remains unclear as to which sections of the Labour Party's online presence was affected by the attack, which is believed to have been a DDoS attack (distributed denial of service). A Party spokesperson stated that despite sections such as election candidature and more being targeted, no data was breached, although DDoS attacks are rarely linked to attempts of stealing data.
Owing to the attack, the party's website is believed to have been working slowly as its cyber security partner, CloudFlare, worked towards restoring all services back to normal. At the time of publishing, News18 has independently verified that most of the UK Labour Party's website is working at normal pace, suggesting that the DDoS attack has been successfully thwarted. It is not yet clear who might have been behind this, and given how no data theft was involved, what might have been the cause of the attack. With political unrest prevailing in UK, the attack may have been a consequential action by opposition of the Labour Party, instead of a coordinated cyber attack endeavour.
Comments
0 comment