French government websites targeted by Russian DDoS attacks

The Noname05716 hacker collective took down the websites of the French national labor, employment and training institute (INTEFP) and the French space agency (CNES), during Vladimir Putin’s yearly address.

Noname05716, a pro-Kremlin hacktivist group, in sync with Russian president Vladimir Putin’s State address on February 21, 2023, launched a wave of DDoS attacks, which targeted several websites with ties to Western governments, in particularly the Italian Defense Ministry, which was taken offline.

Among the targets were several French State organizations. Cybercriminals thus managed to take down the CNES and INTEFP websites.

They also targeted the websites of Data.gouv.fr and Naval Group, the naval defense group, whose main shareholder is the French State. Noname05716 boasted of these exploits on their Telegram channel, stating: “we took a bite out of the French baguette.”

Since the start of the war in Ukraine, Noname05716 is the second most active Russian player in DDoS attacks on Ukrainian and Western websites. However the group is not as efficient as the top player, Killnet. An Avast analysis thus came to the conclusion that only 40% of Noname05716 attacks against Ukrainian websites between June and September, 2022, were successful.