Analysing the Labour Cyberattack
How we discovered that Labour weren’t able to release any new Facebook ads for a whole week.
We’ve built a tool to track the Facebook advertising spend of political parties in the UK. Every day, we scrape data from the Facebook Ad Library API and visualise in its our online tool.
6th-11th November
Last week, we noticed something weird happened. Labour weren’t spending.
From 6th November to 11th November, the data showed that no new Labour ads were being placed on the platform, whilst the Liberal Democrats and the Conservatives continued to spend.
12th November
However today, on the same day that the BBC report that Labour have suffered a highly sophisticated and large-scale cyberattack, a flood of backdated Labour ads have been released to the platform.
It seems that the cyberattack prevented Labour from releasing new ads between 6th-11th November.
Summary
This appears to have been a targeted attack to prevent Labour from releasing new Facebook ads. Whilst the issue seems to have now been resolved, there is every chance something similar may happen again before the end of the campaign.
Check back on our online tracker to see how the story unfolds over the next 4 weeks and for specific insights into the age and gender targeting of each major party.
This is the blog of Applied Data Science Partners, a consultancy that develops innovative data science solutions for businesses. To learn more, feel free to get in touch through our website.
