In recent years, it was the Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) that has been carrying out cyberattacks against French Internet platforms, including hacking the email of Emmanuel Macron’s team during his 2017 presidential campaign.
Foreign Minister Jean-Noel Barrot broke the news on Facebook, as seen by Ukrinform.
“The Russian Military Intelligence (GRU) has been using a cyberattack tool called APT28 against France for several years now,” the head of French diplomacy wrote.
According to the top diplomat, starting in 2021, Russian hackers have attacked dozens of French organizations.
The video attached to the post explains that APT28 (Advanced Persistent Threat – ed.) is a Russian group whose activities are well known to the US and the EU, which have already imposed sanctions against individuals or entities associated with it.
The report also says that in 2017, in the midst of the presidential elections in France, it was APT28 that participated in a massive hacking operation aimed at sowing doubt and influencing public opinion.
“Thousands of documents have been stolen and circulated in hopes to manipulate voters, but this maneuver has failed to really influence the electoral process,” say the authors of the video, prepared based on a new report by the French National Agency for the Security of Information Systems (ANSSI).
In it, the agency states that over the past four years, France has been the target of a Russian cyber espionage campaign. It targets “ministerial institutions, local authorities, administrations, defense enterprises, aerospace companies, research and analytical centers, companies in the economic and financial sectors”.
According to ANSSI specialists, the general goal of the effort is to gather strategic intelligence data on numerous entities in France, Europe, as well as in Ukraine and North America.
As Ukrinform reported earlier, a group of hackers affiliated with Russian foreign intelligence conducted a multi-year campaign directed against French diplomats and embassies. This was stated in a previous report of the National Agency for the Security of Information Systems, published last June.
Source: French diplomacy accuses Russia of long-term cyber espionage
