According to information shared by our colleagues from Numerama, a group of Russian hackers attacked the site of the National Assembly. By flooding it with requests, the group of hackers managed to knock the site out.
If you are looking to access the site of the National Assembly this Monday, March 27, 2023, it is a waste of time. Indeed, the official site of the Hemicycle is totally out of service. The cause ? A denial of service attack launched by a group of Russian hackers close to the Kremlin.
The National Assembly website victim of a DDoS attack
According to our colleagues from Numerama, it is the collective NoName057(16), a group renowned for its actions against the institutions of Western countries. The hackers claimed responsibility for the cyberattack on their Telegram channel. “We have decided to repeat our recent trip to France, where the protests against Macron, who has decided to mock the French and continues to satisfy the Ukrainian neo-Nazis, are still very strong”, the hackers wrote about the encrypted app.
As a reminder, the method used, either a DDoS attack or collective attacks by saturation of service in France, consists in saturating the servers of a site by rapidly multiplying the number of connections.
When the number of requests reaches a sufficiently high number, the server of the targeted site is no longer able to process them. It then goes to safety by deactivating itself. While these attacks do significantly less damage than ransomware, they are highly symbolic. For good reason, their consequence, namely an HS site for hours, is visible to all.
Just go to the website of the National Assembly to see with your own eyes the effects of the attack. For now, it is impossible to access the site of the French institution. We only see a message indicating the site “is currently under maintenance”.
Also to read : The Town Hall of Lille is the victim of a cyberattack, all its computers are offline
A group of pirates with relative efficiency
Note that Avast security researchers have been tracking the activities of the Russian hacker collective since June 1, 2022. According to the data collected, NoName057(16) is reacting to the changing political situation (regarding the war in Ukraine) by targeting enterprises and institutions located in countries allied with Kyiv.
Nevertheless, their success rate leaves something to be desired since only 40% DDoS attacks launched lead to the decommissioning of the targeted site. Moreover, the group would tend to embellish the picture, since 20% of the successes claimed by the collective would not actually be its doing. But concerning the National Assembly, the operation unfortunately worked.