A Telegram channel posts a screenshot of a council homepage timing out, the local paper picks it up before lunch, and by mid-afternoon a service owner who has paid for protection for three years is explaining to a director why the site fell over at a traffic volume the provider’s own graph calls unremarkable. That is what most DDoS attacks on government websites look like from the inside. Not a terabit flood. A modest, short, well-aimed burst that found the one hostname nobody had checked.
The public explanations available to a UK public sector team are either definitional (“what is a DDoS attack”) or legal (“it is an offence”) or advisory (“raise your posture”). Useful, none of them answer the question a service owner actually has after an outage: we bought protection, so why did the site go down anyway? The answers are boringly consistent. Leaked origin addresses, unmanaged authoritative DNS, expensive dynamic endpoints, microsite sprawl, and a contract where nobody is contractually obliged to touch a mitigation policy at 02:00.
What an attack on a public sector site actually looks like
Since 2022, the dominant pattern against UK and European public bodies has been pro-Russia hacktivist activity claimed on Telegram: a target list posted in advance or shortly after, availability-only disruption, no attempt at intrusion, and a screenshot of a failed page load as the deliverable. The NCSC published guidance on 25 March 2024 following denial of service attacks against UK political party websites, and has continued to issue advisories about hacktivist groups targeting UK organisations. Treat the pattern as recurring background weather rather than a lightning bolt from the blue.
The screenshot is the payload
This changes the defence economics more than most vendors admit. If the objective is a claim of responsibility rather than sustained damage, the attacker needs five to twenty minutes of visible failure, not five hours. Attacks that fail get quietly dropped from the channel, which is why unsuccessful attempts on high-profile targets tend to vanish from the record; our write-up of hacktivists failing to take the Vatican’s site offline is the shape of an attack that never becomes a story.
Why modest volumes still make national news
A twenty minute outage on a corporate brochure site is a support ticket. The same outage on a council homepage, during a period of political sensitivity, becomes a story about resilience of public services. Journalists do not have your traffic graph. They have a screenshot and a “service unavailable”page.
Confirm it is an attack before anyone briefs communications
Hosting platform failures and DNS provider incidents produce almost identical symptoms to a layer 7 flood, and the first version of the story tends to stick. Establish the difference before you say anything: our walkthrough on telling a DDoS from an outage in ten minutes covers the mechanics. Over-claiming has a cost of its own, because an availability attack that a press office describes as a “cyber attack on resident data”creates a breach narrative you then have to unwind.
What these attacks do not do
A volumetric or application-layer flood does not read your database, exfiltrate records or authenticate to anything. It denies service. Conflating the two in a holding statement invites subject access requests, member questions and an ICO conversation you did not need to have.
Why council and department sites fall over at modest attack volume
Origin IP leakage, the usual culprit
When a proxied site goes down under a few gigabits, the attacker has almost always found the origin. Public sector estates leak origin addresses more than most, because nothing ever gets deleted from a zone file. An MX record pointing at the same server that hosts the site. A staging. Or www2. Host left behind by a supplier in 2019. A consultation subdomain from a 2016 local plan with a live A record on the same /29. Historical DNS datasets and certificate transparency logs make finding these trivial, and no reverse proxy protects an address the attacker can hit directly.
The fix is an audit rather than a product: enumerate every record in every zone you own, resolve each one, and confirm nothing outside the protected set resolves to the origin range. Then firewall the origin to the proxy’s published prefixes and your own management ranges. Most teams find at least one surprise.
Authoritative DNS, the layer outside the contract
Ask a public sector team whether their DNS is protected and a reasonable number will mention Protective DNS. PDNS is a good control and it is not the answer to this question: it protects outbound resolution from staff devices and networks, not the availability of the authoritative name servers citizens query to find you. If those name servers are two boxes in one data centre, or a single provider with a thin anycast footprint, an attack on the DNS layer takes the site off the internet without touching the web tier. The buyer’s questions are in our guide to authoritative DNS DDoS protection.
Endpoints that cost you far more than they cost the attacker
Static pages are cheap to serve and cheap to cache. Site search, planning application lookups, licensing registers, bin collection by postcode, form submissions and large PDFs are not. A few hundred requests per second against a planning search can take down an estate that shrugs off tens of thousands of requests for the homepage. Attack tooling finds these by crawling, and the asymmetry is the point: one request, one uncached database query, one PDF generated on the fly.
Microsite sprawl
This is the structural weakness of the sector. Campaign domains bought for a two-year programme, partnership sites shared with three other authorities, legacy portals from a predecessor body, all with different suppliers, different DNS and inconsistent protection. One unprotected hostname resolving to shared origin infrastructure undoes the protection on everything hosted alongside it. Inventory of hostnames is a security control, not administration.
Check the three surfaces in order: DNS, network, application
DNS
You want an anycast footprint with real geographic spread, a second independent provider (dual-primary, or secondary via zone transfer), and TTL discipline that reflects a trade-off people rarely state out loud: short TTLs give you agility to move records during an incident, while longer TTLs mean resolvers keep serving cached answers if your name servers become unreachable. If you run DNSSEC across two providers, you need a multi-signer arrangement (RFC 8901) or careful key sharing, which is precisely the detail that gets discovered during the incident rather than before it. Our rundown of staying reachable through a DNS provider outage covers the failure modes.
Network and transport
Three honest options. A reverse proxy or CDN suits HTTP services and is the default for most citizen-facing sites, but only works if the origin is genuinely hidden. BGP scrubbing protects whole address ranges including non-HTTP services, and requires that you hold your own IP space and can announce at least a /24, which rules it out for the many authorities sitting on supplier addresses. Hosting-level filtering is the cheapest and most often oversold: ask directly whether “mitigation”at your host means scrubbing or null-routing your IP, because a remotely triggered black hole completes the attacker’s objective on your behalf.
Application layer, and the accessibility decision nobody schedules
Rate shaping per client, per path and per token is where you defend expensive endpoints. Challenge policy is harder, and it is an accessibility decision as much as a security one. A blanket CAPTCHA on a housing benefit or planning objection form excludes the people least able to route around it, and UK public sector sites sit under the Public Sector Bodies (Websites and Mobile Applications) (No. 2) Accessibility Regulations 2018, with government guidance now pointing at WCAG 2.2 AA (check the current position before you write a policy). Plan graduated responses: cache aggressively, shape by path, use lightweight non-interactive checks, and keep one tested low-friction route (a phone line, an alternative host, a plain form) that you can publish when you do turn challenges up.
A ten minute check a duty engineer can actually run
- Query each authoritative name server directly and non-recursively (dig +norecurse @ns1.example SOA yourdomain.gov.uk). No answer from any of them and the problem is DNS, not the web tier.
- Resolve the public hostname from two networks, one of them off your corporate connection.
- Curl -sS -o /dev/null -w “%{http_code} %{time_total}\n”against the public hostname, then the same request pinned to the origin with –resolve and the correct Host header. Origin healthy plus public hostname failing points at the edge; both failing points at origin or capacity.
- Compare requests per second, bandwidth and 5xx rate on the protection portal’s traffic graph against the same hour last week.
- Check the hosting and DNS provider status pages before you declare anything.
What “managed”has to mean in a public sector DDoS contract
The dividing line is simple. If nobody on the supplier side is empowered to change a mitigation policy at 03:00 without waiting for your sign-off, you have bought monitoring, not management. Write it down in the contract: onboarding and rule tuning, always-on baselining, named escalation contacts on both sides, the out-of-hours trigger, and the authority to act.
Trace the resale chain
Plenty of “managed DDoS protection”bought through a hosting partner is resold capacity from a platform two steps removed, and the escalation path runs through two service desks before it reaches an engineer with policy access. Ask whose network, whose scrubbing centres, which regions, and who answers the phone. Get the answer in writing, with names or at least role-based rotas.
Judge providers on evidence, not capacity slides
Aggregate terabits of global capacity tells you little about what is available in the London or Amsterdam scrubbing centre on the day. Press instead on: time-to-mitigate wording in the SLA and what the remedy actually is; whether the SLA covers detection, mitigation or both; the quality of post-attack reports, including vector breakdown, packets and requests per second, sources and mitigation timeline, because that document is what your auditors and any police report will rely on. Ask for a redacted real report before you sign.
Buying routes and the business case
Crown Commercial Service frameworks are the usual route (check which iteration is live when you buy), and multi-supplier estates need one owner of the protection standard across all hostnames rather than each supplier doing its own thing. Build the case from the cost of a day offline: staff time diverted to phones and reception, missed statutory deadlines, delayed payments, member and press handling. Headline capacity numbers make a weak business case; a statutory consultation closing at midnight makes a strong one.
Always-on or on-demand when your service has statutory deadlines
Detection-and-divert means an attack has to be spotted, a route or DNS change made, and traffic drawn into the scrubbing centre before mitigation begins. Against a fifteen minute hacktivist burst, that sequence can complete just as the attack stops. You mitigated nothing and the screenshot already exists. For the citizen-facing hostname, always-on cover is the pragmatic choice even on a tight budget; the wider trade-offs are set out in our comparison of always-on and on-demand protection.
Calendar risk usually settles the argument. The 31 January self-assessment deadline, pre-election periods, GCSE and A-level results days, grant application windows and consultation closing dates are all dates where a thirty minute outage carries legal and reputational weight rather than just annoyance. A hybrid is common and defensible: always-on for the portal and transactional hostnames, on-demand for wider address space and internal ranges where a few minutes of diversion time is tolerable.
Then verify the promise. Run an onboarding test with the provider, agree reporting cadence in peacetime, and ask for evidence of past mitigations at comparable size. A provider who cannot show you a real timeline from a real event is selling you a diagram.
The first hour
Run a fixed sequence rather than improvising: confirm scope (one hostname or the whole estate), check DNS resolution, check reachability to origin and edge, check application behaviour and error mix, then declare and escalate to the named contact. Publish your status update somewhere that does not depend on the failing infrastructure, because a holding page served from the same name servers or the same origin is no use at all. Social channels, a separately hosted status domain and the phone lines all need to be pre-agreed, not improvised while the homepage times out.
Capture evidence as you go: timestamps in UTC, packet or request samples, firewall and proxy logs, mitigation logs and the provider’s attack report. Denial of service is an offence under section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990, with a statutory maximum of up to 10 years, and the National Crime Agency’s position is that using booter or stresser services is itself an offence. Report through Action Fraud, and via your NCSC reporting route as a public sector body; our UK playbook on legal action after an attack sets out what evidence keeps options open. For dated context on how the incident mix shifted, analysis of incidents reported to the ICO and the FCA put denial of service at around a quarter of reported hacking incidents in the first half of 2022, against 4% the year before; the figure is old now, but the direction of travel it showed has not reversed.
Finish with a review that changes something. Re-audit origin exposure, name the owner of every zone and every hostname, close the contract gaps you found at 02:00, and write the triage sequence into the runbook with the escalation numbers on the front page. DDoS attacks on government websites succeed because these small things stay undone between incidents, not because the attackers are formidable. Fix the leaked records, put a second name server provider in place, protect the expensive endpoints, and make sure someone is genuinely on the hook to act before the next target list appears.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why are government websites such frequent DDoS targets?
Because they are symbolic, easy to name and produce disproportionate publicity for a small amount of traffic. Hacktivist groups aligned with geopolitical causes pick targets that make a recognisable screenshot, and a council or department homepage does that better than an anonymous corporate site. The NCSC’s March 2024 guidance, issued after denial of service attacks on UK political party websites, reflects that pattern.
Are DDoS attacks on government websites a data breach?
A denial of service attack disrupts availability; it does not in itself give the attacker access to data. It can still be a reportable security incident, and availability is part of data protection obligations, so take advice on your specific circumstances. Describing an availability attack as a data breach in public creates problems you then have to correct.
Is a DDoS attack illegal in the UK, and who should it be reported to?
Yes. Section 3 of the Computer Misuse Act 1990 covers unauthorised acts that impair the operation of a computer, carrying a statutory maximum of up to 10 years, and the National Crime Agency treats the use of booter and stresser services as an offence in itself. Report to Action Fraud, and public sector bodies should also use their NCSC incident reporting route.
How much does protection for a public sector website cost?
There is no meaningful single figure, and anyone quoting one without asking questions is guessing. Price is driven by the number of protected hostnames, whether authoritative DNS is included, clean traffic volumes, overage rates per Gbps or per million requests, and above all whether managed escalation is real or nominal. Ask for the overage terms and the out-of-hours escalation commitment in writing, because those are where the surprises live.
Does a CDN or reverse proxy alone stop attacks on a council website?
Only if the origin is genuinely hidden and every hostname you own sits behind it. Legacy mail records, staging subdomains and old A records routinely expose the origin address, at which point the proxy is bypassed entirely. Pair the proxy with an origin firewall limited to the provider’s prefixes, and audit your zones for records that resolve straight to the server.
Should a government service use always-on or on-demand mitigation?
For citizen-facing and transactional hostnames, always-on is the safer choice, because hacktivist bursts of five to twenty minutes can finish before a detect-and-divert model has finished rerouting traffic. On-demand remains reasonable for wider address space and internal ranges. If you have statutory deadlines or election periods in your calendar, weight the decision towards always-on for the services that carry them.