French state services hit by cyber attacks of “unprecedented intensity”
The PM’s staff said that “a crisis cell has been activated to deploy countermeasures”.
Paris:
Prime Minister Gabriel Atal’s office said on Monday that several French state bodies have been hit by cyberattacks of “unprecedented intensity”, while the government has been able to contain the impact.
“Since Sunday, several ministerial services were targeted using familiar technical means but with unprecedented intensity,” Atal’s office said, without giving further details about the targets.
A security source told AFP that the attacks were “not attributed to Russia at the moment”, making it an obvious suspect for many given Paris’ support for Kiev since its invasion of Ukraine.
The PM’s staff said that “a crisis cell has been activated to deploy countermeasures”, meaning “the impact of these attacks has been mitigated for most services and access to state websites has been restored.” “
Specialist services, including the information security agency ANSI, were “implementing filtering measures until the attack is over”.
A group calling itself Anonymous Sudan claimed responsibility for a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on the French government’s network infrastructure.
“We have suffered a major cyber attack… the damage will be widespread,” the group, which posted with an avatar of a hooded Guy Fawkes mask in front of a desert scene featuring pyramids, said in a Telegram post.
“Many different digital government sectors have been affected, including very important websites, along with their associated subdomains.”
Anonymous Sudan is a known organization that has carried out attacks on websites in countries including Sweden, Denmark and Israel in the past year.
Reportedly based in Sudan, it says it targets what it considers anti-Muslim activity, with some indications that it is sympathetic to Russia.
A DDoS attack involves using a computer or network of computers to send a large number of requests to a target system, overwhelming the ability of legitimate users to respond.
According to US cybersecurity firm Cloudflare, Anonymous Sudan is one of several groups employing DDoS attacks and organizations can protect themselves against its methods.
The latest cyber attack to hit France comes after Italy’s defense adviser warned last week that the Paris Olympics and European Parliament elections this summer could be “key targets”.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Sébastien Lecornu said last month that security should be increased against “sabotage and cyberattacks” by Russia, with an internal note seen by AFP saying his ministry was at the top of Moscow’s target list.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)