Labour Party's DDoS attack 'unsophisticated' and not even categorised by the NCSC

Cloudflare and the NCSC play down the scale of the 'large and sophisticated' DDoS attack on the Labour Party

The distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the Labour Party today has been described as "nothing special" and did not even make it onto the National Cyber Security Centre's (NCSC) lowest category rating.

The suggestions come after the Party was subjected to a second attack this afternoon, starting at around 1.20pm, which like the first was successfully mitigated by Cloudflare. According to Reuters' Jack Stubbs, both DDoS attacks have been described as "very unsophisticated".

The integrity of all our platforms was maintained and we are confident that no data breach occurred

He tweeted: "So the ‘sophisticated and large scale' cyber attack… was a short-lived DDoS attempt, picked up by Cloudflare. Per a source: "It was... nothing more than what you would expect to see on a regular basis. It looked like someone bored in their bedroom with a botnet."

Sources at Cloudflare, meanwhile, are reported to have described the attack as "nothing special", suggesting that it was "the sort of thing we deal with daily".

The re-assessment of the severity of the attacks come after the Labour Party described the first DDoS attack this morning as a "sophisticated and large-scale cyber attack". The attack comes just one month before the general election, scheduled for 12th December.

A spokesperson added that they were confident that no data breach had occurred: "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. The integrity of all our platforms was maintained and we are confident that no data breach occurred," the spokesperson said.

They added: "Our security procedures have slowed down some of our campaign activities, but these were restored this morning and we are back up to full speed."

However, Constituency Labour Parties have reported difficulties this week in executing online orders for the leaflets they will need for deliveries during the campaign. One local party head complained via Twitter that "it hasn't been working properly and has now completely failed. Candidates can't get their leaflets off it and approved. It appears to have been hacked".