French Government Suffers Severe Cyber Attacks

Uploaded on 2024-03-14 in TECHNOLOGY--Hackers, GOVERNMENT-National, FREE TO VIEW

Several French government departments are victim to a series of cyber attacks of “unprecedented intensity,” Prime Minister Gabriel Attal's office said Monday, March 11, and the hacker group Anonymous Sudan is claiming responsibility.

The French Prime Minister’s office has told Agence France-Presse that a “crisis cell has been activated to deploy countermeasures” helping restore most services and state websites. France’s cyber security agency said it was “implementing filtering measures until the attacks are over.”

The French State Interministerial Network, consisting of over one million public sector agents and 14,000 state sites, has been hit recently.

The hacker group Anonymous Sudan known for its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks is said to work for the Kremlin and not related to Sudan at all.

This group published on its Telegram page that the attack was carried out by the “@InfraShutdown DDoS infrastructure.”

“We have conducted a massive cyber-attack on the infrastructure of the French Interministerial Directorate of Digital Affairs French.” The group further claims the targeted infrastructure includes over 17,000 IPs and devices, as well as over 300+ domains that have all been knocked down.

These attacks come less than a week after France’s Defense Minister issued a warning against cyber attacks in the lead up to the EU Parliamentary elections in June and the 2024 Paris Olympics starting in July.

Other speculations were raised online that this attack is related to French President Emmanuel Macron’s threat “to deploy French troops to Ukraine,” as was claimed by retired military officer and NATO advisor @CaptCoronado.

Anonymous Sudan has a history of attacking NATO-related personnel and nations and has previously performed repeated DDoS attacks on multiple high-profile NATO-linked targets, including Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mossad, Sweden, Denmark, and Israel.

The cyber gang has also joined forces with pro-Russian hacker groups KillNet and UserSec to attack NATO. The three launched simultaneous DDoS attacks and overwhelmed a target’s website with traffic.

These latest cyber attacks follows a call in February from Defence Minister Sebastien Lecornu to step up protection against "sabotage and cyberattack" by Russia, in an internal note seen by AFP that said his ministry was top of Moscow's target list.

I-HIS | Le Monde | Politico | France 24 | Le Monde

Hindustan Times | Security Affairs

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