Several French government institutions have been hit by cyberattacks of “unprecedented intensity” ahead of the Paris Olympics.
Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s office said in a statement that several state bodies were targeted, without elaborating.
“Many ministerial services were targeted” in attacks that started Sunday night “using familiar technical means but of unprecedented intensity,” Attal’s office said.
According to the statement, the cyberattacks have been “contained.”
The PM’s staff said 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.”
The attacks took place after Attal’s defense adviser warned just last week that the Olympics games in July and European Parliament elections in June could be “significant targets.”
Several hacker groups claimed responsibility for the attacks, including Anonymous Sudan which said it had launched a distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack on French government network infrastructure that affected “very important” websites.
During DDoS attack, a target system becomes unable to respond to legitimate users because of a massive number of requests made by the attackers.
“We have conducted a massive cyberattack… the damage will be widespread,” Anonymous Sudan said, adding “A lot of different digital government sectors have been affected, including very important websites, with their respective subdomains.”
Anonymous Sudan is a known outfit that carried out attacks in the past year against websites in Sweden, Denmark and Israel, among others.
