Pro-Russian group knocks out French Senate’s website

NoName, the pro-Russian hacker collective, took down the website of the French Senate, citing Paris’ arms aid to Ukraine.

The upper house of the French Parliament, the Senate, acknowledged that attackers disrupted its website service, saying IT teams are working to restore the website’s operation.

“Access to the Senate’s website has been disrupted this morning. Our team is working to remedy the malfunctions. We apologize for the inconvenience caused,” reads the Senate’s statement on Twitter.

The supposed perpetrators behind the attack are NoName, a pro-Kremlin hacktivist collective specializing in distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks.

The group posted a message on its Telegram channel earlier this Friday (May 5th), cursing the French government for supporting Ukraine, against whom Russia launched an offensive in February 2022.

“We read in the media that France is working with Ukraine on a new “aid” package, which may include weapons […] and, without thinking twice, we crashed the website of the French Senate,” reads NoName’s statement.

The French Senate’s website displayed a message saying, “Error: We’re experiencing technical problems” at the time of writing this article. The website has been down for most of Friday.

The NoName hacking group is believed to have emerged last year, shortly after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. It’s thought to go after government, media, and other targets in the US and European nations.

While experts have warned people not to underestimate threat actors that mostly employ DDoS attacks, their effectiveness remains an open question as most targets suffer just a few hours of downtime before returning to normal operations.

According to NoName’s Telegram posts, the collective targeted several other French organizations, such as France’s National Centre for Space Studies and Naval Group, a French industrial group specializing in naval defense manufacturing.