Some incidents that were reported in France this week:
The University of Franche-Comté reported what L’Est Républicain described as a major attack n May 14. Some users received emails with malicious attachments.
There does not seem to be any follow-up or notice on the university’s page, so it’s not clear how major this really was — or wasn’t, but it sounds like it might have become serious:
“A campaign to send ‘spam’ with malicious attachments was carried out this week and a few people were tricked”, writes the person in charge of the security of information systems, sent to all the personnel of Faculty. “This has resulted in their computer workstation being infected with an unknown virus and the servers they connect to. We spotted the virus when it tried to upload malware to servers”
They do not say what kind of malware it was attempting to upload — whether it was some ransomware-type of malware or just malware that would turn the entire university’s system into a spam server.
Elsewhere in France, the Stelliant Group was hit by a cyber attack that paralyzed some the activities of the insurance firm since this weekend. On May 19, LeMagIT reported that the attack began on May 14, but did not hit all divisions of the firm equally, thanks to segmentation. The firm was hopeful that no data had been exfiltrated but was as yet unsure.
In response to this question, Christophe Arrebole assures him: “To date, we have not found any trace of data theft”. But he stresses the caution with which he makes this statement, given the state of progress of the investigation: “Otherwise, I would have told you. […] We have some expertise on the subject, to support our customers. Unfortunately, we are never certain, until the end, that there was no theft or transfer of data”.
Le Dauphiné reported that the networks of the Grenoble-Alpes Métropole and the City of Grenoble were attacked on May 21 with a DDOS type of attack. FranceInfo reported, “The breakage was quickly repaired since the metropolis announced that the system had been restored with the help of the operator SFR at the beginning of the afternoon.” (machine translation)
Reporting by Chum1ng0, with contributions by Dissent