A Distributed Denial of Service attack targeted and knocked out major French news sites including Le Monde and Le Figaro.
A DDoS attack on French company Cedexis, which is a core delivery for websites, and helps in speedy delivery of content. By targeting this company, several major French news websites including Le Monde and Le Figaro were knocked offline.
The attack comes days after French President Emmanuel Macron said his campaign was hacked.
The company stated that the attack caused a partial but widespread outage for their customers, but the attack was mitigated and the services were restored as soon as the company was notified.
Mark James, ESET IT Security Specialist, discusses the consequences of a DDoS attack on the business and the customer.
“Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are used these days for a multitude or purposes.
“It may be used as a voice to air their displeasure on your products, services or your views on a certain subject.
“It may be used as a ransom demand in modern day extortion, or it may even be a smokescreen while malware or cyber-attacks are happening in the background.
“Because of the way DDoS works (often thousands or hundreds of thousands of machines all sending requests for information) it can be fairly difficult to determine the source.
“In some cases it could take a while to resolve or counter, but on the same note DDoS protection is not hard.
“With the right information and services DDoS attacks can, in most cases, be completely negated for the average attack.
“As so much of our business involves the internet these days, when it goes down or our providers are unable to provide the service we expect then trade may indeed suffer.
“As more and more devices are sold with insecure software installed and the means to hijack or exploit those said devices becomes easier to get hold off, then these types of attacks will continue to grow.”
Have any services or websites you use regularly been affected by a DDoS attack? Let us know on Twitter @ESETUK.
Join the ESET UK LinkedIn Group and stay up to date with the blog. If you are interested in seeing where ESET has been featured in the news then check out our ‘In the news’ section.