NoName057(16) ramps up DDoS pressure — UK websites warned, businesses should tighten their defences now

NoName057(16) ramps up DDoS pressure — UK websites warned, businesses should tighten their defences now

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) has publicly warned that pro‑Russia hacktivist groups — including the named NoName057(16) — are carrying out sustained denial‑of‑service (DoS/DDoS) campaigns against UK websites and online services.

The advisory makes plain that these ideologically motivated actors are moving beyond simple website disruptions and trying to cause real chaos for public services and critical infrastructure. The NCSC is urging organisations, especially local authorities and operators of essential services, to reinforce their DoS defences immediately.

Why this matters to your organisation

A distributed denial‑of‑service attack is blunt, noisy and very visible — which is exactly what hacktivists want. If your website or customer portal is taken offline you face more than annoying support tickets: you risk lost revenue, frustrated customers, regulatory scrutiny if essential services are impacted, and reputational harm that can take months to repair.

Local authorities, utilities and service providers are obvious targets, but supply chains mean smaller suppliers and partners can be used as stepping stones or collateral damage. In short: an attack on “someone else” can quickly become your problem.

What can happen if you treat DoS as someone else’s problem

Ignore DoS preparedness and you can expect outcomes that sound boring on a slide but feel catastrophic in reality:

• Operational downtime that halts customer transactions or public services.

• Emergency contingency spending — last‑minute cloud scrubbing, third‑party mitigation and expensive consultancy fees.

• Senior management time and attention sucked into an incident, delaying strategic work.

• Contracts and tenders lost because customers demand demonstrable resilience.

• Regulatory enquiries where resilience is a requirement for service providers.

Treat backups like parachutes you have never opened and you’ll find out why testing matters when the ground approaches quickly.

Practical steps that actually reduce DoS risk (not just box‑ticking)

Network and service design

Start with traffic controls and architecture: use content delivery networks, rate limiting, web application firewalls and geo‑blocking where appropriate. Ensure public endpoints are fronted by scalable, provider‑led DDoS protection where possible so attacks are absorbed before they hit your origin servers.

Supplier and dependency management

Know which suppliers host or route your service and what protections they offer. Include resilience and incident response expectations in contracts and test failover arrangements — this is a basic supplier management control an ISO 27001 information security management system helps you formalise.

Business continuity and incident response

Make sure your incident response plan includes DoS scenarios and that runbooks identify escalation, communication and service‑level fallback steps. Exercise these plans regularly. That’s where ISO 22301 business continuity planning earns its keep: tested continuity arrangements keep you serving customers and paying staff while everyone else scrambles.

Controls and standards that make a measurable difference

ISO 27001 gives you a framework to identify, assess and treat risks — including DoS — in a structured way so you’re not relying on hope and a single firewall. Controls around supplier management, availability, incident detection and response are all directly relevant.

For smaller organisations or as an immediate baseline, Cyber Essentials and IASME provide practical controls to reduce common exposures. Meanwhile, targeted staff training via security awareness training helps ensure that when an incident happens, internal comms and escalation don’t add to the chaos.

Action checklist you can start tomorrow

• Map your internet‑facing services and identify single points of failure.

• Confirm whether your hosting or CDN provider offers DDoS scrubbing and what thresholds they cover; document RPO/RTO expectations.

• Run a tabletop exercise for a DoS scenario and update your incident playbooks accordingly.

• Review supplier contracts for resilience clauses and mutual support expectations.

• Implement basic mitigations now: rate limiting, WAF rulesets, and geoblocking where justified.

• Use ISO 27001 principles to prioritise actions and consider ongoing support packages if you lack in‑house capacity.

None of these are magic bullets, but together they make it much harder for noisy hacktivists to knock you offline or make an attack expensive and inconvenient enough that most won’t bother.

A final nudge (and a little brutal honesty)

If your board still treats DoS as a web team problem, now is the time to change that conversation. Resilience is a business decision: it’s about protecting customers, revenue and reputation — not just keeping a website up for vanity metrics. Use recognised frameworks like ISO 27001 and ISO 22301 to turn ad hoc efforts into a repeatable, testable programme.

You don’t need to be paranoid, but you do need a plan. The NCSC has made its concern public for a reason — prepare now, test your defences, and make resilience part of procurement and supplier conversations before you become this week’s headline.