Several sites in French cities were victims of a large-scale cyberattack, orchestrated by a pro-Russian group.
After Marseille and Nice earlier this Tuesday, December 31, other official sites of French cities were affected by a vast and massive cyberattack. This is signed NoName05716, a group of publicly pro-Russian hackers, which had already attacked the sites of the National Assembly and the Senate.
Among the cities affected, there is Nantes, but also Le Havre, Angers, Bordeaux, Pau, Tarbes and Montpellier. All of these sites were made unavailable by a denial of service attack. In other words, the hackers increased the number of requests to deliberately overload the servers which did not hold up.
An attack against “Russophobic France”
On X, Christian Estrosi, the mayor of Nice, indicated that no data leak had been detected, but that a report to Anssi (National Agency for Information Systems Security) had been made .
The city of Marseille, for its part, indicated to AFP that the servers of the company OVH, which host the sites of the city of Marseille, were the subject of a cyberattack which led to the activation of “mechanisms of protection having the consequence of making the sites inaccessible.
The Paris prosecutor's office told AFP that it had taken up these facts, and the investigation was entrusted to the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI).
In the case of a denial of service cyberattack, there is rarely any question of data leaks. It's usually about passing a message and for pirate groups to add a trophy to their dark collection.
On his Telegram channel, NoName05716 welcomed this series of attacks, decided to “celebrate Russophobic France for the coming new year.” The group then spoke of “DDoS shells” towards several websites. However, the latter quickly thwarted the hackers' efforts and are mostly back online.
At the same time, NoName05716 also claimed attacks against government domains, including sites dedicated to French Polynesia, New Caledonia and the police headquarters. But at the time of writing, these sites were online and everything seemed normal.
