Pro-Russian hackers claim attack on French postal service operator

Pro-Russian hacker group NoName057(16) has claimed responsibility for a cyberattack that disrupted France’s postal and banking services ahead of the Christmas holiday, French authorities said.

France’s national postal service La Poste said on Friday that operations had been restored following a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack that began earlier in the week. Despite the disruption, the company said 5.5 million parcels had been delivered by Wednesday afternoon, during what it described as its busiest period of the year.

The Paris prosecutor’s office has opened an investigation into the attack. France’s domestic intelligence agency DGSI took over the probe after the hackers publicly claimed responsibility. Prosecutors told local media the investigation is, at this stage, focused on the deliberate disruption of a data processing service.

La Poste, which employs more than 200,000 people, previously said the incident temporarily knocked key digital systems offline, affecting services such as online parcel tracking and slowing mail distribution. It said there was no evidence that customer data had been compromised.

The disruption also affected La Banque Postale, La Poste’s banking arm, which warned customers that access to online banking and its mobile app was temporarily unavailable. Most of the services were restored on Wednesday. 

NoName057(16) emerged at the onset of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and is known for launching large-scale DDoS attacks against Ukraine and its allies. The group coordinates relatively simple but disruptive attacks, often with the help of hundreds of volunteers, and has built a botnet of several hundred servers.

NoName057(16) has mainly targeted European countries, including Poland, Czechia, Lithuania and Italy. Earlier in July, the group’s operations were disrupted by international law enforcement but the hackers continue to operate.

The incident follows a separate cyber intrusion disclosed earlier in December at France’s Interior Ministry, where attackers gained unauthorized access to email accounts and confidential documents. French authorities later arrested a 22-year-old suspect in connection with that case.