Lizard Squad, the well-known hacktivist cybergang, is pledging to mount personal cyberattacks on Britain’s Labour Party leader, Jeremy Corbyn.
As the UK continues to be roiled by Brexit debate ahead of a Dec. 12 general election, the Labour Party said on Tuesday that it had been targeted by a “sophisticated and large-scale” cyberattack bent on taking out its online presence with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) effort.
Lizard Squad, which specializes in mounting DDoS attacks against high-profile targets, took responsibility for the attack. It tweeted out that “no terrorist-supporting government should be allowed to rule a country” – in a reference to leader Jeremy Corbyn’s views on Northern Ireland; politics-watchers say that Ulster is at the heart of the country’s inability to get a Brexit deal done.
https://twitter.com/UGLegion/status/1194274553402404864
Now, the group has told the UK’s Independent newspaper in private messages that more attacks are imminent.
“If Labour do win the election, you can expect the whole of the government and Labour websites to go offline,” said one purported squad member. “Jeremy Corbyn’s family members’ personal accounts have been compromised and their home internet is under a DDoS attack as we speak.”
It’s unclear whether the statements are mainly bluster or not, but the party’s head of campaigns, Niall Sookoo, wrote in a letter to local campaigners obtained by media that the original attack failed – and, no data was compromised – thanks to the “robust security systems” that it has in place.
“Yesterday afternoon our security systems identified that, in a very short period of time, there were large-scale and sophisticated attacks on Labour party platforms which had the intention of taking our systems entirely offline,” he wrote. “Every single one of these attempts failed due to our robust security systems and the integrity of all our platforms and data was maintained. I would I like to pay tribute to all the teams at Labour HQ who identified this risk and acted quickly to protect us.”
Lizard Squad has a long history of DDoSing a wide range of targets ranging from online gaming platforms to Taylor Swift. It maintains a botnet that started with hacked home routers, which has expanded in the internet of things (IoT) era – using it for its own ends as well as renting it out as a DDoS-for-hire service.
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