UK Labour Party Servers Hit by DDOS from Russia and Brazil

A complex Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack hit the UK Labour Party”s server infrastructure, but failed to compromise any system or to steal any data.

The Labor Party”s executive director of elections, Niall Sookoo, said that their security systems identified a large-scale attack designed to take the entire system offline. Fortunately, the server managed to deal with the attack.

“We have experienced a sophisticated and large-scale cyber-attack on Labour digital platforms. We took swift action and these attempts failed due to our robust security systems,” said Sookoo, according to a BBC report. “The integrity of all our platforms was maintained and we are confident that no data breach occurred.”

The last part of the statement is essential because that”s usually the goal of DDOS attackers. Organizations fear a denial of service attack will disrupt their online presence, and that”s certainly possible. Studies show that, 9 times out of 10, the cybercriminals are using such attacks to mask other types of intrusions leveraged against organizations to steal data by taking advantage of previously undiscovered vulnerabilities.

An inside source from the party told the BBC that the DDOS originated from Russia and Brazil and consisted of “tens of millions of attacks.” The biggest issue, besides losing data to the malicious actors, is the challenge of repelling DDOS attacks without the use of specialized services that can dissipate the load.

The Labor Party says they have returned to normal operations and the attack only slowed their campaign activities.