14 DAY TRIAL // French news sites went down on Wednesday night after a DDoS attack. The move comes days after newly elected President Emmanuel Macron said his campaign was hacked.
The DDoS attack targeted Cedexis, a Portland-based company which helps speed up content delivery. By taking down this company's servers, several major French news websites went down as well, including Le Monde and Le Figaro.
"At approximately 2 PM GMT, the Cedexis infrastructure came under a unique and sophisticated Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This attack caused a partial but widespread outage that affected many of our customers. Our customers are our number one priority and at this time, the attack is being mitigated, and services are being restored," the company said in a statement.
According to Cedexis, three out of five of its content delivery networks were taken down in the attack. At the moment, all services have been restored.
Julien Coulon, the company's co-founder, says they haven't yet identified the source of the attack.
Cedexis has been around since 2009 and is split between France and the United States nowadays. It has some major clients, including Airbus, Air France, as well as many other US companies, including Microsoft.
Prevention, always important
"Nowadays Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks are launched for a variety of reasons. They may be used as a voice to air one’s displeasure on your products, services or views on a certain subject or as a ransom demand in modern day extortion, or even be a smokescreen while malware or cyber-attacks are happening in the background. Due to the way DDoS attacks work (often thousands or hundreds of thousands of machines all sending requests for information) it can be difficult to determine the source of the attack and could in some cases take a while to resolve or counter," noted Mark James, IT security specialist at ESET.
"But on the same note DDoS protection is not hard and with the right information and services can in most cases be completely negated for the average attack and easily attainable as a paid service for most businesses. As so much of our business involves the internet these days if it goes down or providers are unable to provide the service we expect then trade may indeed suffer. As more and more devices are sold with insecure software installed and the means to hijack or exploit those devices becomes easier to get hold off, these types of attacks will continue to grow," he added
Corero Network Security director Sean Newman has said that these attacks are another example of the sophistication with which modern DDoS attacks are planned and executed.
"This latest attack is similar to the approach used with DNS provider DYN, late last year, and shows that attackers often have multiple options to complete their missions. And, where an attack on a single entity has the ability impact many targets simultaneously, as in these cases, the attackers can get a lot more bang for their buck. It’s another proof point for the old adage that security is only as strong as the weakest link and that organisations must ensure protection provided by outsource partners is up to the standards they expect," his statement reads.