Cyberattack paralyzed France's postal service on Christmas Eve, blocking deliveries and online payments
Kyiv • UNN
A cyberattack crippled France's national postal service, La Poste, three days before Christmas, blocking parcel deliveries and online payments. This caused significant difficulties for millions of people in the midst of the holiday season and dealt a blow to the company, which delivered 2.6 billion parcels last year.
Just three days before Christmas, a cyberattack crippled France's national postal service, blocking and delaying parcel deliveries and online payments, UNN reports with reference to AP.
The publication notes that the timing was terrible for millions of people in the midst of the Christmas season, as exhausted postal workers fended off frustrated customers.
No one immediately claimed responsibility, but suspicions were numerous.
At a post office in southern Paris, usually bustling at this time of year, employees wondered if the attack could be linked to Russia. Or to a disgruntled customer, or to a colleague.
Officials did not comment on the perpetrator. The Paris prosecutor's office investigated the case.
What the La Poste postal service called a "major network incident" remained unresolved until Monday evening, more than eight hours after it was first reported. For a company that delivered 2.6 billion parcels last year and has more than 200,000 employees, this is a major blow.
Let's add
La Poste said that a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) incident "made its online services unavailable." It noted that the incident did not affect customer data but disrupted parcel deliveries.
Letters, including holiday greeting cards, could still be sent and delivered. But transactions requiring tracking or access to the postal service's internal computer systems were impossible.
The cyberattack also damaged online banking. Customers of the company's banking division, La Banque Postale, were blocked from using the app to approve payments or perform other banking services. The bank redirected approvals to text messages.
"Our teams are mobilized to quickly resolve the situation," the bank said in messages posted on social media.
The disruption came a week after the French government was targeted by a cyberattack aimed at the Ministry of Interior, which is responsible for national security.
In that incident, the suspected hacker extracted several dozen confidential files and gained access to data related to police records and wanted persons, Interior Minister Laurent Nunez said on France-Info television. He blamed the incident on the ministry's "carelessness." French media reported that a 22-year-old man had been arrested.
Also last week, prosecutors said that the French counterintelligence agency was investigating a suspected cyberattack plan involving software that would allow remote users to control the computer systems of an international passenger ferry. According to officials, a Latvian crew member is in custody on charges of acting on behalf of an unspecified foreign state.
France and other European allies of Ukraine claim that Russia is waging a "hybrid war" against them, using sabotage, assassinations, cyberattacks, disinformation, and other hostile actions that are often difficult to quickly trace back to Moscow.