In five municipalities (communes) of France, located near the Loire River on the western coast of the country, a large-scale cyberatak on local web servers occurred, as a result of which civil servants lost access to documents and the opportunity to perform their work.
According to the statement on the website of the city of Saint-Naser, the functioning of the web services in the following communes has been violated: Saint-Naser, Donjo, porn, Montoire-de-Breetan and La-Shard de Mare. All of them are located around the seaport and have a total population of about 100,000 people.
Local officials warned that recovery could take months. Meetings regarding this situation are held daily, which emphasizes the significance of the incident. The French cybersecurity agency Anssi also provides all possible support to eliminate the consequences of the attack as soon as possible.
According to the leadership of Saint-Nazer, the attack occurred on the night of April 9th. Employees of the local authorities affected do not access jobs, files and software for business. Local media reported that when employees came on Wednesday morning, they were asked not to include computers and not to check e-mail from mobile phones.
The attack will have “significant consequences”, the mayor David Samzen warned. Email systems and telephone systems of municipalities are currently disabled. It is unclear what exactly was disconnected as a precaution and what services suffered as a result of the attack.
The nature of the incident has not yet been confirmed, it is not known for certain whether the attackers were able to abduct the data of local residents or civil servants. “At this stage, the origin of cyber attacks is not known, as well as the duration of the restriction of the systems,” the local authorities said.
This incident followed a powerful March DDOS attack on a number of state organizations of France. According to local authorities, the attacks began on March 10 and differed in unprecedented intensity. Nevertheless, specialists quickly took measures to mitigate the consequences, so that the blow to most services was significantly reduced, and then completely restore access to them.