British Labor Party hit by cyberattack in middle of election campaign

Nov. 12 (UPI) -- Britain's Labor Party said Tuesday it was targeted by a sophisticated and large-scale cyberattack, as it's ramping up its election campaign ahead of next month's vote.

The main opposition party to British Prime Minister Boris Johnson's Conservative Party said it reported the attack Monday to the National Cyber Security Center and notified supporters.

Labor Party officials, however, said the attack failed and the effort did not breach or compromise data.

"We took swift action and these attempts failed due to our robust security systems," a party spokeswoman said. "The integrity of all our platforms was maintained and we are confident that no data breach occurred.

"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."

Officials said the attack aimed to interfere with a targeted servers, services or a network by overwhelming it with a flood of Internet traffic.

"That involves bombarding websites or digital services with large numbers of traffic until they collapse," technology expert Rowland Manthorpe told Sky News. "The important thing to know about this is this is not an extremely cunning, sophisticated kind of attack -- it's crude, it's brute force, it's actually quite easy to do.

"This is not the kind of surgical attack which nation-state actors tend to be known for, this is nasty internet vandalism of a brute-force kind."

The attack came as the party is campaigning ahead of the scheduled Dec. 12 British elections.