French gov hit with cyberattacks of 'unprecedented intensity'
French media is reporting that several government departments have been the targets of multiple cyberattacks – attacks sources at the Prime Minister’s office say are of "unprecedented intensity.” Hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan is claiming responsibility.
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French media is reporting that several government departments have been the targets of multiple cyberattacks – attacks that sources at the Prime Minister’s office say are of "unprecedented intensity.” Hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan is claiming responsibility.
So intense that the Prime Minister’s office told International news outlet Agence France-Presse that a "crisis cell has been activated to deploy countermeasures," which helped to restore most services and state websites.
France’s cybersecurity agency (ANSSI) said it was "implementing filtering measures until the attacks are over," PM staff had told the news outlet.
According to other government sources, the nation’s State Interministerial Network (RIE), which connects one million public sector agents and 14,000 state sites, has been targeted since Sunday, France’s BMF TV reported Monday.
Meantime, Anonymous Sudan, a hacker group known for its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks, is taking credit.
The hacktivists posted as such on their Telegram page Monday, stating 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,” Anonymous Sudan said.
The group claiming the targeted “infrastructure includes more than 17,000 IPs and devices as well as over 300+ domains that have all been knocked down strongly.”
“They host and organize a lot of the digital French government and organizational sectors, meaning a lot of different digital government sectors have been affected, including very important websites, with their respective subdomains. The damage will be widespread as core digital government endpoints have been hit, and the French know the details very well," it said.
Last week, France's Defense Minister had issued a warning against cyberattacks in the lead up to the EU Parliamentary elections in June and the 2024 Paris Olympics starting in July.
Additionally, insiders on X posted about the attack, attributing it to French President Emmanuel Macron's threat “to deploy French troops to Ukraine, Massive Cyberattack hit France!!, said retired military officer and NATO advisor @CaptCoronado. Anonymous Sudan is known for targeting NATO and its member nations in the past.
Anonymous Sudan made waves in the first half of 2023 with its repeated distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks on multiple high-profile NATO-linked targets, including Israel's Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the shadowy Mossad.
The group had relentlessly targeted the Swedish SAS Airlines through several separate attacks: the first as part of a coordinated Valentine's Day attack against Sweden and, then in another ongoing campaign.
After that, the gang joined forces to attack NATO with other pro-Russian hacker groups, KillNet and UserSec, all three launching simultaneous DDoS attacks, which overwhelm a target's website with traffic, essentially knocking it offline. Anonymous Sudan is reportedly neither anonymous nor Sudanese, instead believed to be a pet project of the Kremlin.