Several websites of French cities and departments were inaccessible on Tuesday, after a group of hackers claimed computer attacks in retaliation for French support for Ukraine.
At 4 p.m., the sites of the cities of Marseille and Tarbes were inaccessible, or accessible intermittently, as well as the site of the department of Haute-Garonne.
The facts were claimed on X by a group of hackers called NoName, already known for other attacks and defending the interests of Russia.
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).
On its account French and New Caledonia, but they were still accessible on Tuesday.
The mayor of the city of Nice, Christian Estrosi, confirmed in a message posted on X that the city site had been targeted by an attack.
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.
Several other communities, including the cities of Pau and Angers, as well as the Landes department, indicated that they had not noted any incident.
DDoS attacks, “denial of service”, are a mode of action regularly used by NoName.
Their process is relatively simple. “The distributed denial of service attack is the act of sending a lot of automatic requests to a website made by robots which have no intention of consulting the site at all but which saturate it so that people who would legitimately want to consult it cannot do so,” explains Benoît Grunemwald, cybersecurity expert at ESET, a company specializing in the field.
Such attacks do not have the aim or consequence of stealing personal data.
For Benoît Grunemwald, these are above all propaganda operations: “This gives the impression of a climate of digital insecurity.”
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