France is facing "unprecedented" cyberattacks in the wake of the Charlie Hebdo terrorist attack that took place last week.
Hackers targeted a massive 19,000 French websites, including Mediapart, France Info and Le Parisien. While all sites are back online at this time, they were offline at 10 a.m. Jan. 16. The attacks appear to be rather small denial-of-service attacks and do not appear to have caused much damage.
"What's new, what's important, is that this is 19,000 sites - that's never been seen before," said Adm. Arnaud Coustilliere, head of cyberdefense for the French military. "This is the first time that a country has been faced with such a large wave [of cyberattacks]."
Coustilliere went on to suggest that the attacks were a response to the huge demonstrations against terrorist attacks, which drew 3.7 million people into the streets in France on Sunday, Jan.11, to show solidarity.
Two gunmen stormed Charlie Hebdo, a French satirical magazine, on the morning of Jan. 7, leading to the massacre of 12 people at the magazine's offices. The week after the attack, the magazine ran a copy of its magazine with the front page depicting Muhammad holding a sign that says "Je suis Charlie," which is French for "I am Charlie." It is likely that the magazine's history of running controversial topics relating to Muslims made it the target of the attacks. Most, however, see the massacre as an attack on freedom of speech.
Structured jihadist groups are being blamed for the attacks, having posted images of jihadist symbols on the hacked websites that are now all back online. Hacker group Anonymous has launched its own war on jihadist hackers and is targeting pro-jihadi websites and accounts on social media.
Agence France-Press, or AFP, says that the attacks were the work of "people who do not adhere to a certain number of values" which were expressed during the march.
The attacks have led to a rise in demand for the magazine, which has now released its latest edition as an iOS and Android app and ordered a print run of more than 5 million copies.
The attacks on French websites are symbolic of the shifting of terrorists' attention toward the cyber-world. Terrorist groups are increasingly targeting social media and websites in their attacks, with this likely to continue and increase in frequency in the future.
Denial-of-service attacks involve hackers flooding websites with requests to show the target website, causing it to be unable to keep up with all the requests, in turn making it unable to load.
