A cyber attack crashed a city council website targeting other UK authorities

The city council’s website was taken down after being targeted by a cyber attack, while other local authorities confirmed they had previously been affected.

Portsmouth City Council said it was one of a number of local authorities across the country affected by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack carried out by a group called NoName057(16).

It added that the data of users and residents is not threatened by the attack.

DDoS is when an attacker floods a server or website with internet traffic coming from multiple sources.

NoName057(16), who runs an account on social media platform X, said earlier this week that he had successfully hacked more than a dozen local authorities, including Bournemouth, Christchurch and Poole (BCP) Council, Medway Council, Exeter City Council and Burnley.

Portsmouth City Council said in a Facebook post on Friday: “We can confirm that the Portsmouth City Council website is under cyber-attack, which means you will experience problems when trying to use the site.

“The attack did not affect any city services, user and resident data are not at risk, but the website may be unknown.

“We are working to resolve the issue as soon as possible and apologize for any inconvenience caused.”

Sarah Chamberlain, director of information technology and programs at BCP Council, confirmed the authority was also the target of an attack, but faced disruption just two hours after acting “quickly and efficiently”.

She said: “We are fully prepared to respond to any attempted cyber attack and our IT teams acted quickly and effectively to implement these plans earlier this week when our corporate websites were attacked.

“The attack attempted to disrupt our online services, but we were able to work with our ISP to restore all of our websites in just over two hours. We remain vigilant and continue to monitor the websites closely.”

Middlesbrough Council posted on X that its website was temporarily down on Wednesday after being targeted by “suspected online hackers” and was back up the next day.

The National Cyber ​​Security Center (NCSC) said it had issued guidance to affected councils.

An NCSC official said: “While DDoS attacks are relatively low in complexity and impact, they can cause disruptions by preventing legitimate users from accessing online services.

“Organizations are encouraged to familiarize themselves with our effective Denial of Service guidelines to support prevention and mitigation of such attacks.”