The Assembly's website, which links to a fixed page where it says "currently under maintenance", is the target of a "denial of service" attack (saturation of requests, editor's note) carried out by the collective of pro-Russian hackers NoName057.
He claimed responsibility for the attack on his Telegram channel, in response to France's support for Ukraine, Ivan Fontarensky, technical director of cyber defense at Thales, told AFP.
"We have decided to repeat our recent trip to France, where the protests against Macron, who decided not to care about the French and continues to serve Ukrainian neo-Nazis, do not calm down," the group wrote on Telegram.
NoName also claims an attack on the Senate website, for the moment without visible effect.
NoName is one of some 80 pro-Russian hacker collectives that are attacking institutions in countries that support Ukraine, including Western European countries, said Nicolas Quintin, chief analyst of Thales' threat analysis team, which brings together some fifty experts around the world.
The France, one of their regular targets, has experienced several such attacks recently. Last week, they blocked the Aéroports de Paris website and targeted the DGSI website. Both waves of attacks were claimed by another group of pro-Russian hackers, Thales said, which tracks their communications.
NoName, created in March 2022, which communicates in Russian and English, conducts denial of service attacks, basic cyberattacks.
These pro-Russian collectives have flourished since Russia's invasion of Ukraine. They act without ransom seeking, unlike traditional hackers.
Low-cost denial-of-service attacks typically only result in temporary site crashes. But they can handicap companies if they are linked to their sales or production system.
© 2023 AFP