Professional Russian hackers target two Leicestershire councils, cause almost no disruption

A group of professional Russian hackers targeted two Leicestershire councils in a coordinated cyber attack.

The collective, known as NoName057(16), claimed responsibility for the Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attacks against Leicestershire County Council and North West Leicestershire District Council (NWLDC) .

A DDoS attack works by overwhelming a target's servers with a massive volume of traffic, rendering websites and digital services inaccessible to legitimate users.

The move follows a pattern of the group targeting UK infrastructure following Russia's invasion of Ukraine.

While Leicestershire County Council said its robust systems prevented any disruption, NWLDC confirmed parts of its website were unavailable for several hours.

To stop the interference, the district council blocked all non-UK web traffic, with a spokesperson confirming the move was necessary to stop further attacks.

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC), the UK's technical authority on cyber threats and part of the intelligence agency GCHQ, said it had been monitoring the situation.

The NCSC informed NWLDC of the attack and worked with the council and its supplier to contain it.

Despite the disruption, both authorities moved to reassure residents that their personal information remained safe.

A NWLDC spokesperson said: "It only targeted our website. No resident data has been compromised, and a block has been put in place to any non-UK IP addresses to stop further attacks.

"This has been confirmed by our website supplier.

"We had minor disruption which was dealt with quickly meaning the issue only lasted a couple of hours.

"The NCSC have been aware of this already, and we have worked with them and our supplier to deal with this and future attacks."

Leicestershire County Council said it faces similar threats every day.

A spokesperson said: "Councils are having to deal with attempted cyber attacks on a daily basis and have robust systems in place. There's no disruption, all of our services are running as normal and there are no concerns loss of data."