On the night of April 8th to 9th the French channel TV5 Monde was hacked by a group calling themselves Cybercaliphate. For Hélène Zemmour, the channel’s digital director, it was a “historic attack, something completely new”. The damage was considerable: in a very short time employees’ work-place mailboxes were cut, social networks and the web-site stopped and then brought back online with Cybercaliphate content. TV programmes were interrupted. Cybercaliphate first appeared in January when it attacked Newsweek magazine’s twitter account, and then broke into the Twitter and YouTube accounts of the US military command in the Middle East and Central Asia (US Central Command, CentCom), spreading propaganda messages.
Online activists had probably been working for weeks, identifying which computers broadcast. According to Jean-Pierre Verines, the channel’s IT director, “out of the company’s thousands of computers they managed to locate the encoding servers.” As one of the investigators said, this is not a failure on the part of TV5 Monde: “the TV5 Monde network was well managed, by serious people, but it was fragile: once a hacker got in there, there were no watertight doors.” Technical teams are still trying to secure the computer systems, which could still take weeks.
Sources: lemonde.fr, l’express, France tv info
