For 2 days in a row, the Labour Party in the UK has been hit with DDoS attacks, and while no data has thought to have been lost, it HAS interfered with access to their site and their electoral tools:
The Labour party has faced a second cyber-attack, a day after experiencing what it called a “sophisticated and large-scale” attempt to disrupt its digital systems.
It is understood the party was the subject of a second distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on Tuesday afternoon. Such attacks use “botnets” – networks of compromised computers – to flood a server with requests that overwhelm it.
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Labour has not said who it suspects is behind the attacks, but said it was confident its security systems ensured there was no data breach.
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Labour has not said which digital platforms were targeted, but it is understood some of them were election and campaigning tools, which would contain details about voters. The party has sent a message to campaigners to say what happened and to explain why the systems were working slowly on Monday.
This raises the obvious questions of who did this, and why did they do it now?
There is actually a fairly simple answer: A deadline is coming up for “Freepost” (in the US, they would be called “Business Reply Mail” leaflets, and currently the system to submit and gain approval for these mailers is offline.
Someone is monkey wrenching Labour voter organizing efforts.
Does anyone know about Labour candidates having big problems with party’s leaflet-creating website? One local campaign chief says: “it hasn’t been working properly & has now completely failed. Candidates can’t get their leaflets off it & approved. It appears to have been hacked.”— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) November 11, 2019
— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) November 11, 2019
I’m told that some Labour candidates fear that unless the party can resolve the problem very soon, then they could miss the deadline for getting their Freepost leaflets written, designed and approved— Michael Crick (@MichaelLCrick) November 11, 2019