Ο website of the French National Assembly (French: Assemblée nationale) received on Monday a cyber attack that managed to take it offline and which 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 used by a public system content management, developed six years ago by IT services company 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 has attacked Polish airport and e-government websites, among others, following the delivery of Leopard tanks from Warsaw to Ukraine, as well as targets in Denmark, the Czech Republic and Lithuania.
Officials they told franceinfo that they can't yet confirm that the cyber attack came from Russian hackers, but you are looking into it theme about the "identification" of the attacks.
Russian teams have a history supportof 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 hacker group boasted at 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.
