A town hall has beefed up its security measures after becoming the latest local authority to be hit by a cyber attack.

On Friday morning, Portsmouth City Council in Hampshire said it was among those affected due to an attack by a group calling itself NoName057(16).

Pro-Russian hackers, who used a Russian flag as the cover photo in X, claimed responsibility for the attacks.

It caused problems for people trying to access the council’s website, but residents’ data was not affected and the website was back online on Saturday, a council spokesperson confirmed.

Portsmouth City Council previously said it had been affected by a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack.

A DDoS uses multiple computers to flood a website with traffic in an attempt to overload it.

It may degrade website performance or even make it completely inaccessible.

The government’s National Cyber ​​Security Center (NCSC), which provides guidance to organizations affected by cyber attacks, said it typically takes “time and money to analyze, defend and recover” from such an event.

According to the council, teams were still available to answer queries during working hours and residents could access online services and make payments on the MyPortsmouth website.

Middlesbrough Town Council was the target by hackers on Wednesday, and its website was taken offline after its IT department identified a problem.

The problems were also reported by Salford, Bury and Trafford Town Councils on Thursday.

The NCSC said it had provided guidance to affected councils.

He has since been contacted for further comment, following claims of new visits to UK websites on Sunday.