Labour announced that it suffered a large-scale cyber attack yesterday afternoon.
Cyber Attack
The attack impacted Labour’s digital platforms.
Security procedures dealing with the attack slowed down Labour’s campaign projects amid preparations for the upcoming general election.
The cyber attack was not successful due to Labour’s strong digital security systems.
It has been reported that there has not been any breach of data privacy due to the cyber attack.
Although the cyber attack failed, it still caused problems by interrupting Labour’s campaign activities.
After Labour’s digital security systems prevented the cyber attack, Labour restored its campaign activities.
Labour contacted the National Cyber Security Centre to report the cyber attack.
The cyber attack intended to overwhelm Labour’s digital system with large numbers of traffic until Labour’s digital system collapsed.
If the cyber attack was successful, it would harm Labour’s campaign activities by significantly slowing down or paralysing Labour’s election preparations.
Furthermore, Labour detected millions of cyber attacks coming primarily from Russia and Brazil.
The Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS)
Cyber attacks intended to take Labour’s digital systems entirely offline in order to slow Labour’s activities down.
All of the cyber attacks detected were DDoS attacks (The Distributed Denial of Service).
These cyber attacks take digital systems offline, and make them collapse by flooding computer service with too much traffic.
DDoS attacks paralyse digital systems without breaking into them.
Labour informed campaigners regarding the problem caused by cyber attacks to explain why Labour’s digital systems were working slower than usual.
Cloudflare
Labour works with Cloudflare (NYSE: NET) to protect its digital systems. Cloudflare provides DDos cyber attack protection to web users.
For example, Cloudflare filters traffic to prevent digital systems from collapsing.
The company filters illegitimate requests received by digital systems to prevent DDos cyber attacks.
Furthermore, Cloudflare backs up company data by storing versions of digital systems on its servers.
As cyber attacks become more common, the demand for cyber attack prevention systems such as Cloudflare increases.