“Respect Russia! Otherwise, we will continue to wage war on you.” Here is the message that was displayed in Russian for a few days on the page of the site of the city of Bry-sur-Marne, in Val-de-Marne, before the community regained control of its computer site and file a complaint.
But why are Russian hackers interested in this town located 14 kilometers east of Paris? In reality, she is not the only one to have been affected by this computer attack by defacement, ie the malicious modification of the home page of a site – no personal data would have been stolen. In all, about thirty sites hosted by Abtel were affected.
Vulnerable Content Manager
As the company points out to Actu.fr, these sites were developed on the basis of an old content manager that is now very vulnerable. It is “above all a communication operation without technical performance”, summarizes on twitter Nicolas Arpagian, vice-president of cybersecurity consulting firm Headmind Partners.
This action of cyber vandalism follows several other flashy operations recently attributed to Russian hackers against targets in France, visibly targeted because of its support for Ukraine, invaded for a year by its cumbersome neighbor.
“No long-term impact”
At the end of March, the National Assembly had thus been the victim of a denial of service attack, claimed by a collective of pro-Russian hackers, NoName057(16). Earlier in the month, several French airports were also targeted by denial of service attacks by hacktivists from Anonymous Sudan, pro-Russian Islamist hackers, Numerama had spotted.
“It’s painful for everyone but there is no long-term impact”, had relativized Vincent Strubel, the director general of Anssi, questioned on this subject at the beginning of April. This kind of extremely opportunistic attacks – by exploiting flaws in sites that may be related to power or by carrying out denial of service operations – are popular with hacktivists of all stripes. It is indeed a classic way of making noise around a subject, failing to really threaten information systems.
Eight years ago, the Charlie Hebdo support operation led by Anonymous triggered a wave of attacks by defacement of several thousand French sites. The malicious action had prompted Anssi to recall the basics of computer hygiene to avoid such attacks exploiting defects in securing access to the management interface, the use of a weak password, or a content manager or outdated software.