Notorious Hackers Claim Responsibility For Attacks On Labour Party
The Lizard Squad a well know group of hackers has now claimed responsibility for the recent cyberattacks on the British Labour Party's digital systems. Lizard Squad is a black hat hacking group, mainly known for distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks primarily this was used to disrupt gaming-related services.
DDoS is commonly used by cyber criminals, to directly attack web traffic to a single website or online service in order to cause a system to crash. Labour claimed that the first cyberattacks failed because of the party's "robust security systems however, it then happened again.
It was believed to be the biggest cyberattack yet on a party HQ and follows months of warnings from watchdogs that overseas agencies, including some belonging to the Chinese and Russian governments, were targeting British institutions including the Commons, Whitehall departments and businesses.
Following the attacks, Lizard Squad claimed to be in control of powerful tool known as a botnet that is capable of carrying out such attacks.
“Today’s DDoS attack on the Labour Party is to show that no terrorist-supporting government should allow to rule a country," it stated..... If Labour do win the election, you can expect the whole of the government and Labour websites to go offline," said the member, who shared screenshots appearing to show a botnet tool used to carry out the DDoS attacks.
The nature of botnets makes them extremely difficult to trace, as they are made up of thousands and sometimes millions of hijacked devices from all over the world.
Speculating on the credibility of Lizard Squad's claims, other security experts pointed to the group's history of carrying out similar attacks as evidence it could have been them. In 2018, a US judge sentenced a 20-year-old man who identified as a member of Lizard Squad to three months in prison after he pleaded guilty to carrying out cyberattacks.
Lizard Squad denied that the attacks were commissioned by a third party, however the timing of the attacks mean such a possibility cannot be ruled out. Following the attacks, former GCHQ boss Brian Lord suggested that a hostile nation state may have been behind them, potentially even using them as a distraction to carry out more "sinister" data hacks on the Labour Party.
A Labour spokesperson said the Party did not wish to speculate on the motives or origins of the attack, adding that they had not previously heard of Lizard Squad. Labour leader previously said that attacks against a political party made him "suspicious" and "very nervous" about the upcoming general election.
The first incident was reported to the National Cyber Security Centre, who said: "The attack was not successful and the incident is now closed." However, the second attack has moved events forward and it seems that more attacks on UK political parties digital infrastructure must be expected.
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