NCSC Advisory Highlights Persistent Disruption Tactics

The UK’s National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) issued an advisory warning that Russian-aligned hacktivist groups - particularly NoName057(16) - were actively sustaining denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks against local government websites and critical infrastructure organizations. These campaigns leverage crowdsourced botnets and publicly available attack frameworks to overwhelm public-facing services, causing outages and operational disturbances. While not exceptionally sophisticated in technique, their persistence and coordination pose significant resilience challenges for municipal IT teams that lack advanced defensive automation. The advisory urged organizations, especially in the public sector, to adopt layered DDoS mitigation tools, refine incident response playbooks, and integrate real-time traffic anomaly detection into security operations - areas where ongoing research into scalable, automated defenses could yield significant operational benefits.

19-01-2026