A number of media portals in France went down a day after the government received warnings from unknown sources of a wave of Islamist cyber attacks.
The French government officials said nearly 20,000 media websites were targeted by unknown Islamist hacking group after the recent terror attacks in Paris that claimed lives of 17 people.
Some of the media websites that were affected by the blackout were Marianne, Le Parisien and 20 Minutes.
However, most were restored soon.
The web host of media sites said that it was probing whether it was one of them, but it has denied involvement of an external distributed denial of service attack.
Vice Admiral Arnaud Coustilliere, the head of cyber security for the French military, on Thursday said that the “well known Islamist hackers” and “structured” groups were behind the attacks against the 20,000 sites. He, however, declined to elaborate about upon the hackers.
The Internet outage among the media portals began the following day. The authorities said that it’s not yet clear if the two are associated with each other.
Meanwhile, the web host Oxalide said that they are investigating each and every line of enquiry, but its initial investigations had declined the possibility of an external distributed denial of service attack.
The tech experts explain the hackers flood servers with requests to render the target site in such web attacks, causing the site to fail to load.
Oxalide said that it was still investigating who was behind the attack.
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