Many hackers are mobilizing for another wave of attacks on 8th of December against French institutions and companies. A first wave was committed on 3rd and 4th of December.
Activists advertising themselves as Anonymous collective members called for mobilizations on Twitter, Reddit, Telegram, and Internet Relay Chat against Carrefour, Total, EDF, Orange, La Française des Jeux, and especially government sites, the National Police, and media posts like TF1 and BFM.TV. They claim that such entities are worth attacking because they’re acting against the interest of the people.
Anonymous France denies any involvement in a video posted on YouTube:
“This commendable fight has been hijacked by left-wing and right-wing extremists, which we deplore given the violence.”
The cyber-intelligence teams of the American company FireEye observed attacks on at least five French institutional websites: the French social welfare collection agencies, the Ministry of Justice, the Université Paris- South, the University of Lorraine, and the Franco-American Foundation. The primary method used was distributed denial of service (DDoS) attacks which consists of traffic overloading from different sources in the hopes of crashing the website.
David Grout, the FireEye expert who detected the first cyber attacks, said the perpetrators are “classic” hacker groups, formed well before the Yellow Vests movement:
“The cyber attacks were first claimed by anti-Israeli and pro-Erdogan hacktivist groups, and hackers claiming Anonymous, French-speaking hacktivists, then came forward, not ‘yellow vests’ but hackers who have decided to support the ‘Yellow Vests’ by attacking institutional sites.”
When asked about his opinion on the motivations of the hackers, David Grout responded:
“The common thread between hacktivists in general and ‘yellow jackets’ is their anti-establishment. A social movement the size of that of ‘Yellow Vests’ is an opportunity for them to strike a big blow,” believes the cyber analyst.
France is bracing itself for yet another hot day of protests and threats. Most probably, the attacks are going to consist of DoS or DDoS initiatives. Propaganda messages are also to be expected against the French establishment which seems to unite both the Yellow vests and the hackers.
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