“The site is currently under maintenance”, displays the website of the National Assembly since Monday, March 27 in the morning. The latter was the subject of a denial of service attack (DDOS), which consists of making a site temporarily inaccessible by overwhelming it with a very high number of connection requests.
This operation, technically very simple and easy to perform, was claimed by NoName057, which presents itself as a collective of pro-Russian Internet users. In a message posted Monday on their Telegram channel, they justify their gesture by echoing the current mobilizations against the pension reform as well as the French policy vis-à-vis the Russian invasion in Ukraine. The group also claims to have carried out the same type of attack on the Senate’s website on the same day, but it did not seem to have any particular difficulty operating and was still online Monday afternoon.
Operation similar to that of Killnet
NoName057(16) is one of many pro-Russian groups that have sprung up since the Russian invasion of Ukraine. Its operation, like that of Killnet and other self-proclaimed “hacktivist” nebulae, is very rudimentary: on a Telegram channel, the administrators of NoName057(16) announce, every day, a list of targets, which essentially consist of the names of domains and IP addresses. Very often, the targets are facades of institutions or companies considered enemies of Russia, often because of political decisions related to the war in Ukraine.
With just over 1,400 subscribers today, the Telegram channel of NoName057(16) gives advice to its readers to participate in the group’s actions and carry out a DDOS attack, as Killnet also does. Its administrators generally like to praise their merits and celebrate the success of their attacks. These groups of self-proclaimed “hacktivists” often like to oversell their stocks: “DDOS missiles were sent to the authentication site of the Italian portal of the transport regulatory authority”wrote for example the group this weekend, not without a certain emphasis.
In total, there are some eighty groups of pro-Russian hackers carrying out this kind of attack, estimates with Agence France-Presse (AFP) Nicolas Quintin, chief analyst of the Thales threat analysis team. . France, one of their regular targets, has seen several such attacks recently. Last week, they blocked the Groupe ADP site and targeted that of the General Directorate of Internal Security (DGSI). These two waves of attacks were claimed by another group of pro-Russian hackers, said Thales, which follows their communications.