Last week several UK councils experienced outages on their websites, with some even knocked offline or rendered inaccessible to users, due to a series of DDoS attacks. The cyber onslaught targeted various local authorities and other organisations, including small banks and the Premier League football club Tottenham Hotspur. The attack is claimed to be work of the politically motivated hacker group NoName057.
Among the affected councils were Bradford, Eastleigh, Keighley, Salford, Tameside, and Trafford. The websites of Eastleigh and Trafford, along with Salford, remained down until Wednesday afternoon, with Salford’s site returning with warnings of ongoing technical difficulties.
Additionally, on Thursday, October 31st, Middlesbrough, Medway, and Hastings council websites were unavailable for some time. Other councils, such as Plymouth and BCP (Bournemouth, Christchurch, and Poole), displayed banners indicating site-wide issues.
NCSC, UK’s National Cyber Security Centre has been providing support for the affected councils in the form of guidance to prevent and mitigate further attacks.
Security experts have suggested that certain council’s websites have remained down due to an Azure App Service, which lacks native DDoS protection, and other’s on-site webservers couldn’t handle the excessive load, causing the site to go offline.
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