Labour claims it was hit by a "sophisticated" and "large scale" cyber attack were played down by security experts today. In a letter to party staff, their elections director said they were targeted yesterday afternoon with the intention to "take our systems entirely offline".
Niall Sookoo, the party's Executive Director for elections and campaigns, told staff that many systems had "reduced functionality" and were working "very slowly".
He said: "Yesterday afternoon our security systems identified that, in a very short period of time, there were large scale and sophisticated attacks on Labour platforms which had the intention of taking our systems entirely offline.
"Every single one of these attempts failed due to our robust security systems and the integrity of all our platforms and data was maintained."
Jeremy Corbyn said today it was a "very serious" attack and the National Cyber Security Centre are investigating.
He said earlier he was "very nervous" it could be a "sign of things to come in this election".
GCHQ sources told The Sun there is no evidence to suggest cyber attack on the Labour Party was state-sponsored.
The intelligence agency's experts from the National Cyber Security Centre, based in Victoria, were called in by party chiefs to investigate the attack.
They found that the denial of service method used was low level in sophistication, so it is likely instead to be the work of amateur hackers.
But Labour candidate immediately went out to claim a "dirty tricks campaign".
Shadow minister Clive Lewis said: "My, my, dirty tricks have a come along way from tearing down @UKLabour garden boards & extracting leaflets from letterboxes."
One source told The Sun it was likely to be a "nation state level attack" involving up to 50 computers.
It was said to have only lasted for 30 minutes, and was likely to be a "test attack" for another longer blast.
The source added: "Those two systems should be mostly safe now but if the attackers keep doing their homework they'll be able to find a whole set that are ripe to get bust open.
"It's out of the Russian playbook for sure."
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