PARIS — France’s National Assembly website was brought down Monday in a cyberattack claimed by pro-Russian hackers.
“We decided to repeat our recent trip to France, where protests against [French President Emmanuel] Macron, who decided not to give a damn about the French and continues to ‘serve’ Ukrainian neo-Nazis, still do not subside,” hacker group NoName057(16) wrote on its Telegram channel.
The pro-Kremlin group is behind a string of distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks in recent months, including on Polish airport and e-government websites after Warsaw delivered Leopard tanks to Ukraine, but also against targets in Denmark, the Czech Republic and Lithuania.
National Assembly officials told franceinfo they couldn’t confirm yet that the cyberattack came from Russian hackers but was working on “identification.”
The hacker group claimed they targeted the French institution because of Macron’s highly unpopular pension reform — French citizens have taken to the streets in huge numbers to protest against the government’s plans to raise the retirement age — but also against Macron using a constitutional tool that allowed him to pass the legislation without a vote in parliament. Last week, French MPs barely refused to take down the government in a narrow confidence vote.
Russian groups have a history of backing French protests and anti-establishment demonstrations, including by supporting the Yellow Jackets movement, which rocked Macron’s first term as president.
“By the way, it was the actions of this French authority that served as a catalyst for mass protests in the country — a week ago, the National Assembly rejected a vote of no confidence in the French government,” NoName057(16) wrote on Telegram.
As of Monday afternoon, the National Assembly’s website was still under maintenance. The hacker group boasted on Telegram that the site “can’t recover all day after our attack.” They also claimed to have targeted the Senate’s website, but it was still available on Monday afternoon.
