French state services hit by cyberattacks of ‘unprecedented intensity’
The latest cyberattack to hit France follows a warning from Attal’s defence adviser just last week that the Olympics games in July and European Parliament elections in June could be “significant targets”.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal‘s office said several state bodies were targeted but did not provide details.
“Many ministerial services were targeted” from Sunday “using familiar technical means but of unprecedented intensity,” Attal’s office said.
A security source told AFP that the attacks “are not currently attributable to Russia,” an obvious suspect for many given Paris’ support for Kyiv since the invasion of Ukraine.
The PM’s staff added that a “crisis cell has been activated to deploy countermeasures”, meaning “the impact of these attacks has been reduced for most services and access to state websites restored.”
Specialist services including information security agency ANSSI were “implementing filtering measures until the attacks are over”.
Several hacker groups claimed responsibility for the attacks on Telegram, a messaging app, including one calling itself Anonymous Sudan which said it had launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on French government network infrastructure.
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