Several French media websites have already experienced attacks, going down for a day after warnings were issued earlier on. Sites such as Le Parisien, Marianne and 20 Minutes were among those which were affected, although majority of them were restored not too long after. According to the French government, there were some 20,000 sites which had been targeted after the deadly terror attacks in Paris saw 17 people die.
Investigations were going on as to whether the attack was attributed to an external distributed denial of service attack or not. It was on Thursday itself that Vice Admiral Arnaud Coustilliere, the head of cyber security for the French military, mentioned that “structured” groups and “well known Islamist hackers” were behind the attacks against the 20,000 sites, although there has been no further elaboration made.
Web host Oxalide did mention to the BBC that there will be no line of enquiry dismissed in the investigation, although an external distributed denial of service (DDoS) attack had been ruled out in an initial investigation. For a DDoS attack to work, it will see servers flooded with requests to render the target site, which will inadvertently cause it to fail to load. Hopefully all will be sorted out soon in due time, and the culprits will be brought to justice.