Mumsnet, one of the UK’s largest parenting websites, has come under several attacks from hackers, one of which involved armed police being called out to the London home of the parenting site's co-founder. Some accounts were hijacked and the site’s administrative functions accessed. Additionally, there was an attempt to force Mumsnet offline by swamping it with internet traffic, in what is known as a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

Following this news, IT security experts give insight into what happened:

Igal Zeifman, Senior Digital Strategist at Imperva says: “According to news reports the attack peaked at 17,000 requests per second. While significant, compared to the regular amount of traffic, this is still considered a mid-sized application layer DDoS attack that could have been easily mitigated with adequate DDoS protection.

To put this in context, largest application layer attack we saw last quarter peaked at over 179,000 request per second, with even a single hijacked computer able to spew out several thousand request a second.”

Kevin Epstein, VP Advanced Security and Governance at Proofpoint, adds: “Swatting is where a false report of an active threat at a victim’s address is made to the police, to provoke an active armed response. This is traumatic at best, potentially dangerous at worst to the victim, who the police must recognize as distinct from a potential target. Swatting is a crossover point between cyber- and real-world threat; to ‘swat’ someone, an attacker must have details of the victim’s physical address and life – and in this case it appears such may have been taken from internal records. Statistically such a compromise is quite likely to have been driven by an email phishing based campaign. Sadly, we’ve reached a point in cyberattacks where clicking on the wrong email can result in your facing the wrong side of an armed response officer, in physical jeopardy.”