Labour Party hit by major cyberattack

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The Labour Party has revealed it suffered a major cyberattack against some of its systems.

A "sophisticated and large-scale" attack hit an unidentified part of the Labour Party's systems just weeks before the UK General Election.

However the attack, which looks most likely to have been a DDoS-style assault, reportedly failed to get past the "robust security systems" the party in place, a Labour spokeswoman said.

Sophisticated

"Yesterday afternoon our security systems identified that, in a very short period of time, there were large-scale and sophisticated attacks on Labour Party platforms which had the intention of taking our systems entirely offline," Niall Sookoo, the party's executive director of elections and campaigns, wrote in a letter to party campaigners.

"Every single one of these attempts failed due to our robust security systems and the integrity of all our platforms and data was maintained."

"I would I like to pay tribute to all the teams at Labour HQ who identified this risk and acted quickly to protect us."

Labour has reported the attack to the National Cyber Security Centre, but has not yet confirmed which part of its systems were affected.

"We took swift action and these attempts failed due to our robust security systems. The integrity of all our platforms was maintained and we are confident that no data breach occurred," the Labour Party spokeswoman added.

Via: BBC

Mike Moore
Deputy Editor, TechRadar Pro

Mike Moore is Deputy Editor at TechRadar Pro. He has worked as a B2B and B2C tech journalist for nearly a decade, including at one of the UK's leading national newspapers and fellow Future title ITProPortal, and when he's not keeping track of all the latest enterprise and workplace trends, can most likely be found watching, following or taking part in some kind of sport.