A cyber attack of "unprecedented force," which "was intended to saturate the New Caledonian internet network," hit a service provider in New Caledonia overnight, Christophe Gygès announced on Wednesday, May 22. During the daily press briefing, this member of the local government in charge of digital affairs also told French television networks that the majority of IP addresses used for the attack "seemed to originate from Russia" and that it had taken place shortly after the announcement of French President Emmanuel Macron's surprise visit to the archipelago.
The online network monitoring tools did seem to confirm there was an abnormal volume of suspicious traffic in New Caledonia on Tuesday night. However, the local government's statements raised a number of questions.
Firstly, on the nature and targets of the attack: Gygès expressed his satisfaction that the rapid intervention of government services, including the National Agency for Information Systems Security (ANSSI), had enabled the attack to be quickly contained. But versions of events differ. Gygès referred to a distributed denial-of-service attack (DDoS), which sought to saturate an ISP's infrastructure with attempted connections in order to block it to legitimate users, while the Mayor of Nouméa Sonia Lagarde spoke on French television of an attack that targeted "a huge number of organizations," including "banks."
The cybercrime unit of the Paris prosecutor's office, which took over the investigation opened on Wednesday by the Nouméa prosecutor's office, told Agence France-Presse (AFP) that the operation had been carried out "to the detriment of several institutions in New Caledonia," without specifying which ones. "The situation is currently being analyzed," stressed the prosecutor. Contacted by Le Monde, ANSSI had not responded by the time this article was published. Furthermore, when DDoS attacks are carried out by groups linked to a state, they generally make this known. For the time being, this attack has not been claimed.
"In New Caledonia, as is often the case in islands, there are several access providers, but the telecom infrastructure has a single entry point, managed by the Post and Telecommunications Office. This structurally makes the islands' network easier for an attacker to saturate," explained François Deruty, director of operations at French cybersecurity firm Sekoia. "There are precedents: In 2018, a teenager managed to severely disrupt internet access in French Polynesia. And when the network is saturated, sites or services can fall, without them necessarily having been the primary target." New Caledonia has itself been the target of DDoS attacks in the past, including in 2016.
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