DDoS Attack Targets UK Labour Party Weeks Ahead of Election
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DDoS Attack Targets UK Labour Party Weeks Ahead of Election [needs js]
The UK's Labour Party has confirmed a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack targeted its Web services weeks ahead of a national election on December 12, party and security officials report.
Adversaries overwhelmed Labour's digital platforms with malicious traffic, according to Britain's National Cyber Security Centre, which was notified following the incident, Reuters reports. The incident was not successful, a spokesman says, and the matter is now closed. Party officials say the DDoS attempt failed due to its "robust security systems" and no data breach occurred.
BBC reporting states:
The BBC's Gordon Corera has been told Monday's attack was not linked to a state. Earlier, a Labour source said that attacks came from computers in Russia and Brazil.
Our security correspondent said he had been told the first attack was a low-level incident - not a large-scale and sophisticated attack.
A National Cyber Security Centre spokesman said the Labour Party followed the correct procedure and notified them swiftly of Monday's cyber-attack, adding: "The attack was not successful and the incident is now closed."
[...] The BBC has confirmed that Labour is using software by the technology company Cloudflare to protect its systems. The US-based company boasts it has 15 times the network capacity of the biggest DDoS attack ever recorded, meaning it should be able to absorb any deluge of data directed at one of its clients.
[...] Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said Monday's cyber-attack was "very serious" and also "suspicious" because it took place during an election campaign. "If this is a sign of things to come, I feel very nervous about it," he said.
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