French Government Hit with Severe Cyberattacks

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Several government departments in France fell victim to multiple cyberattacks of “unprecedented intensity,” and hacktivist group Anonymous Sudan is claiming responsibility.

The French Prime Minister’s office told Agence France-Presse that a “crisis cell has been activated to deploy countermeasures” helping restore most services and state websites. France’s cybersecurity agency said it was “implementing filtering measures until the attacks are over.”

Other government sources report that the nation’s State Interministerial Network (which connects one million public sector agents and 14,000 state sites) has been targeted since Sunday.

According to Cybernews, the hacker group Anonymous Sudan known for its distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks is actually a “pet project of the Kremlin” and not related to Sudan at all. The group took credit for the attack by posting on its Telegram page Monday, claiming 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.” The group further claims the targeted infrastructure includes over 17,000 IPs and devices, as well as over 300+ domains that have all been knocked down strongly,” they added.

This comes less than a week after France’s Defense Minister issued a warning against cyberattacks in the lead up to the EU Parliamentary elections in June and the 2024 Paris Olympics starting in July. Other speculations were raised online that this attack is related to French President Emmanuel Macron’s threat “to deploy French troops to Ukraine,” as was claimed by retired military officer and NATO advisor @CaptCoronado.

Anonymous Sudan has a history of attacking NATO-related personnel and nations and has previously performed repeated DDoS attacks on multiple high-profile NATO-linked targets, including Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Mossad.

The cybergang has also joined forces with pro-Russian hacker groups KillNet and UserSec to attack NATO. The three launched simultaneous DDoS attacks and overwhelmed a target’s website with traffic.