Several French government websites are inaccessible this Wednesday, September 4, 2024. According to initial information gathered, they are victims of a giant cyberattack carried out by a foreign power.
Cyberattacks are increasing. Since the start of the war in Ukraine in February 2022, the number of cyberattacks against companies or public bodies has increased by 140% in Europe. France is now the fifth country most targeted by ransomware in the world. According to several observers, the increase in attacks is correlated with the supply of weapons to the Kiev government. Faced with this increasingly tense situation, Thierry Breton, the European Commissioner for the Internal Market, announced on April 5, during an interview with Les Echos, the creation of the famous “European cyber shield” to detect and prevent attacks upstream. Despite the preventive measures put in place, France has once again been targeted by a wave of cyberattacks.
A giant cyberattack intended to paralyze France
This Wednesday, September 4, many government and community sites were targeted by DDoS attacks. As a reminder, this is an attack that can slow down the activity of a website, or even make it completely inaccessible. This type of attack is unfortunately quite easy to set up since cybercriminals send an incalculable number of requests to a site in order to crash it. As revealed by Ludovic Laborde, cyber specialist and ethical hacker, outages have been recorded on several sites, including that of the Ministry of Justice and the Ministry of Transformation and Civil Service (which hosts the State Secretariat for Digital Affairs). When visitors try to connect to these sites, they either come across a 403 error (access denied) or the impossibility of accessing the platform without any particular details.
But that’s not all! Other public bodies have been affected, such as: the Transport Regulatory Authority, the Regulatory Authority for Electronic Communications, Posts and Press Distribution (Arcep), the National Office for War Veterans and Victims, as well as the cities of Reims, Nîmes and Angers. “These DDoS attacks show how crucial it is to strengthen cybersecurity to protect our digital infrastructures”explained Ludovic Laborde. For the moment, the origin and motivations of the cyberattacks remain unclear. The theory of a wave of pro-Russian cyberattacks remains the most likely. In these cases, the attacks can have several objectives: weakening the targeted country by stealing sensitive information, or obtaining ransoms (ransomware). For the moment, access to several sites has been restored even if others still remain affected.