The website of the French National Assembly (French: Assemblée nationale) was on Monday hit by a cyber attack that managed to take the site offline and was carried out by pro-Russian hackers.
Hackers attacked French government websites and broadcast propaganda messages such as "Respect Russia or we will continue the war against you".
French authorities said the attack took place on a website using a shared system managementof content, developed six years ago by the services company information technologys Abtel.
“This system, which was relatively secure six years ago, is no longer secure. We warned our customers months ago that there was significant risk, but it takes a large budget to rebuild a website from scratch," a spokesperson said.
Half of the affected websites have now been restored, although French authorities claim otherwise.
The pro-Kremlin group behind a series of DDoS attacks in recent months attacked Polish airport and e-government websites, among others, following the delivery of Leopard tanks from Warsaw to Ukraine, but also against targets in Denmark, the Czech Republic and Lithuania.
Officials they told franceinfo that they cannot yet confirm that the cyberattack came from Russian hackers, but you are looking into the matter of "identifying" the attacks.
Russian groups have a history of supporting French and anti-establishment protests, among others supporting the Yellow Vest movement, which rocked President Macron's first term.
From Monday afternoon, Mr website of the National Assembly of France was still under maintenance. The team hacker boasted on Telegram that the site "can't recover all day after our attack". They also claimed to have targeted the Senate website, but probably failed to affect it.
