As the aftermath of the attack on French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, more than 19,000 French websites have been hacked by some “more or less” structured Islamic groups of hackers—reveals the French chief of Cyberdefense
On Thursday the head of French military’s cybersecurity department Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, told reporters that such attacks have been categorized as “defacement.” Defacement refers to common attacks through which hackers gain control of a website and alter or replace its content.
“That’s never been seen before. It’s the first time that a country has been faced with such a large wave,” he alleged.
Among the targeted websites are military regiment websites too as well as some pizza shops’ sites.
The follow-up of the Infamous Attack:
The attack on Charlie Hebdo magazine resulted in death of 12 people. Now in what can be termed as the fresh range of attacks some Islamic extremist groups like FallaGa Team, AnonGhost or the United Islamic Cyber Force have been prompting cybervandalism. They are trying to deface French websites to show their propaganda messages.
Simultaneously, some hackers associated with Anonymous have also launched their separate campaign titled “OpCharliehebdo” and are attacking Jihadist websites in return. A popular French Jihadist website was taken down on Saturday by this group.
However, these attack are not sophisticated by any standard, assert experts at Mashable. According to them, these hackers are eyeing low-hanging fruits, that is, their target are those websites that are already vulnerable to easy attacks or have faulty settings. Therefore, these become easy task.
“They hack anything they find handy to do propaganda,” says Andrea Stroppa an independent security researcher.
No response has been received by the French government as of now. The information for this news-bit was retrieved from Mashable.
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