Anonymous Sudan, a Russian-speaking hacktivist group, has claimed the severe distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks that disrupted several French government services on Monday.
In a statement issued on Monday, Prime Minister Gabriel Attal’s office confirmed that a series of DDoS attacks started on Sunday night, hitting multiple government ministry websites.
“We have conducted a massive cyberattack on the infrastructure of the French Interministerial Directorate of Digital affairs (DINUM),” said Anonymous Sudan in an official Telegram channel run by the group. “The damage will be widespread as core digital government endpoints have been hit and the French knows the details very well.”
In addition to the DINUM, the group confirmed in the post that the attacks also impacted other French ministries and government organizations including the Directorate General of Civil Aviation, Ministry of Health and Social Affairs, National Geographic Institute, Ministry of Economy, Finance and Industrial and Digital Sovereignty, and Ministry of Ecological Transition and Territorial Cohesion.
The French Prime Minister’s office told local media that a crisis unit had been set up Sunday evening to deploy counter-measures. By Monday, the impact of the attacks had been reduced and access to government websites re-established, it said.
Anonymous Sudan, however, claimed that as of Tuesday, the attack was still in full swing. “It’s been over 24 hours and the “cyber crisis team they deployed proved useless,” the group added in a Telegram post made on Tuesday. “The attack is still ongoing and we’re chilling while their systems burn.”
