UK Labour Party says it has experienced a 'large-scale cyber attack' | Hacker News Reader

UK Labour Party says it has experienced a 'large-scale cyber attack'

edition.cnn.com

68 pointsdevicetray017 comments

From what I understand of the story it started with an email sent to internal activists explaining why there were some performance issues with internal campaign tools. The attack was just a DDoS but once it hits the press it takes on a life of its own. Simplified technical details for a non-technical activist base get used to create a story, it's interesting to see how the sausage gets made but other than referring to the government body for cyber attacks as a matter of protocol I don't think there's much to it.

As an aside Labour really do seem to have a pretty good technical team. Both the party and the loosely affiliated activist group Momentum have built a variety of campaign tools which have helped organise and mobilise large canvassing efforts. I've been impressed by what they've managed to put together. It sounds like they shared ideas and expertise with Bernie's campaign team in the US when it comes to building these tools.

Just a standard DDoS attack - that was handled by CloudFlare as designed.

An attack by the many, not the few.

Very clever, humour pun at it's best.

You mean "large-scale", as in many computers?

The motto of the UK labour party is "For the many, not the few". I hope you get the joke now.

I would be interested if they could release all pertinent logs. I think it would be something interesting to spool through.

For instance "large scale attack" makes me assume a DDoS, which is hardly the level of attack I'd expect to risk data exfiltration unless it is used as a distraction.

So I'm not sure what "large-scale" means in this context; eitherway, pcaps plz.

IDK the details, but "large-scale" could also mean that they tried to attack multiple services/servers.

And also probably a bit more dedicated and targeted that the normal password brute-forceing and vulnerability scanning that is going on all the time anyway.

The BBC are reporting it was a run of the mill DDoS attack.

I suppose "large" is relative. The numbers for a DDoS attack can look large to someone with little experience (journalists, PR, small-time IT department, etc...) and the same numbers could be in inconsequential daily occurrence for a large scale provider.

I don't see why they'd do that. A 'russian hacking' narrative would serve the parties interest, and while they won't sink to the level of actually insinuating that the attack was carried out by state actors (which seems very unlikely) there's no harm in letting the media do their thing.

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It would be nice to have some context and by that, a weekly data volume in attacks and types of attacks as well as normal visitors. May be a case of they scale and this is just normal. Equally the same data upon other parties, again over time and also be great to see previou election spikes in visitors and atatcks.

But for many, this is just part and parcel of the state of play of the internet and politics upon that stage.

I'd not rule this out as a tactical PR release to sway hearts and minds style approach. But then, I tend to be over pragmatic when it comes to anything political when the minutia is missing along with the context it brings.

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