The Prime Minister’s staff added that “a crisis team has been activated to deploy countermeasures”.
Paris:
French Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s office said on Monday that several French state institutions had been hit by cyberattacks of “unprecedented intensity” while insisting that the government had been able to contain the impact.
Attar’s office said that starting Sunday, “many ministerial services were targeted” using “familiar technical means but with unprecedented intensity”, without providing further details of the targets.
A security source told AFP the attacks “cannot be attributed to Russia at this time” and are apparently suspected by many given Paris’ support for Kiev since its invasion of Ukraine.
The prime minister’s staff added that “crisis teams have initiated deployment of countermeasures” meaning “the impact of these attacks on most services has been reduced and access to national websites has been restored.”
Professional services agencies, including information security agency ANSSI, are “implementing filtering measures until the attack is over”.
A group calling itself “Anonymous Sultans” has claimed responsibility for a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack on French government network infrastructure.
“We have carried out a massive cyber attack… and the damage will be widespread,” the group said in a Telegram post, which posted a picture of a man wearing a hooded Guy Fawkes mask in front of a desert scene of the Pyramids. ‘s avatar.
“Many different digital government departments were affected, including very important websites and their respective subdomains.”
Anonymous Sudan is a well-known group that has carried out attacks on websites in countries including Sweden, Denmark and Israel over the past year.
The group is said to be based in Sudan and says it targets anti-Muslim activities, with some indications it sympathizes with Russia.
A DDoS attack involves using a computer or computer network to flood a target system with requests, rendering it unable to respond to legitimate users.
According to US cybersecurity company Cloudflare, Anonymous Jordan is one of a number of groups employing DDoS attacks, and organizations can protect themselves against its methods.
The latest cyberattack on France comes after Attal’s defense adviser warned last week that this summer’s Paris Olympics and European Parliament elections could be “important targets”.
Meanwhile, Defense Minister Sebastian Le Cornu said last month that defenses against Russian “sabotage and cyberattacks” should be stepped up, an internal report seen by AFP said. primary goal.
(Except for the headline, this story has not been edited by NDTV staff and is published from a syndicated feed.)
