Labour cyber-attack: Hostile nation state could be behind hack, ex-GCHQ boss says

‘Sophisticated actors will use basic DDoS attack as masquerade for other more sinister motives,’ Brian Lord warns

A former GCHQ boss has said nation state hackers may have been behind the "large-scale cyber attack" on the Labour Party.

The party's digital platforms were hit by a "sophisticated and large-scale" cyber attack on Tuesday morning, a Labour spokesperson admitted, although it failed because of the party's "robust security systems" and they were confident that no data breach occurred.

Brian Lord, who is now the managing director of cyber security firm PGI, said the attack appeared to be a distributed denial of service (DDoS), whereby huge amounts of web traffic are directed to a single destination in order to overwhelm websites, subsequently knocking them and other online services offline.

Cyber criminals offering to perform such attacks currently advertise their services on the dark web for around $100 (£78). The unsophisticated nature of the attack would not rule out state-backed hackers, however, with Mr Lord warning that it could have been used as a diversion while other more complicated data hacks were carried out.

"Some organisations, including more sophisticated actors, will use a basic denial of service attack as a masquerade for other slightly more sinister motives," he told LBC.

"So quite often they will tie up resources in one area while they perhaps take data out or carry out other activity and I think when the Labour Party say 'we are satisfied that no data is being breached', I think they probably need to do enough investigation to make sure this denial of service wasn't in fact simply a diversionary tactic for other things."

The Labour Party did not give further details about the attack but said it had been reported to the National Cyber Security Centre.

Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn said that attacks against a political party made him "very nervous" about the upcoming election, adding that the timing of it "is suspicious and something one is very worried about".

Carl Wearn, head of e-crime at online security company Mimecast, also said that with exactly one month to go until the general election, motivations for the attack should be considered when looking at the perpetrator.

“Given the particular targeting of this attack it is almost certain this is some form of hacktivism or hostile state-sponsored activity," he told The Independent.

"Although still essentially criminal activity in its nature, given recent geopolitical events over the last few years, this attack could obviously well be aimed at exfiltrating sensitive information from the Labour parties infrastructure as we approach an election."

Other cyber security experts warned that if a hostile nation was behind the cyber attacks, then they would be difficult to trace.

"It is difficult to speculate on who the perpetrators might be," said Mike Fenton, CEO of UK-based cyber security firm Redscan.

"Nation state attackers are particularly good at covering their tracks so any forensic investigation is unlikely to be straightforward."