The Labour Party has experienced a large-scale cyber attack on its digital platforms but says it is confident that no data has been breached. As campaigning for next month’s general election gets fully underway, the party was hit with what is reported to have been a distributed denial of service attack on Monday, using botnets to bombard a server with requests and overwhelm it.

In a message to campaigners, Labour explained why its systems were running slower than usual on Monday, but added that all were now back up to full speed. It has not specified which platforms were targeted, but a party spokesperson said: “We have experienced a sophisticated and large-scale cyber attack on Labour digital platforms. We took swift action and these attempts failed due to our robust security systems. 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. We have reported the matter to the National Cyber Security Centre.”

The origin of the attack is not yet known, although the BBC has reported a Labour source as saying that the incident comprised “tens of millions of attacks” mostly originating from Russia and Brazil.

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