Toulouse: Fighting at the National School of Civil Aviation (Enac), victim of a cyberattack
The National School of Civil Aviation (Enac) in Toulouse is doing everything possible to restore its computer systems, which have been severely paralyzed for a week after a large-scale cyberattack.
“Never before have we had a computer attack of such magnitude.” It is currently the commotion at the National School of Civil Aviation (Enac) in Toulouse, where 2,000 students are being trained this year for careers as airline pilots and air traffic controllers. aeronautical engineering.
A week ago, Enac was indeed the subject of a cyberattack which contaminated all the school’s servers, paralyzing many applications and sharing data. As a result, the hundred planes, the Enac fleet, which allows future pilots to learn to fly during their studies, remained grounded. The school not wanting to take any “risk of making them take off at the risk of an accident”.
“The DGAC helps us a lot”
For a week, Enac’s IT teams, supported by experts from the cybersecurity department of the Directorate General of Civil Aviation (DGAC), are on deck “to clean the servers” and put the applications back into operation. Painstaking work.
“Things are gradually becoming effective,” said Enac deputy director Philippe Joachim on Friday March 18. Classes have resumed for students. But the planes still haven’t taken off, we still have to secure the sharing of information. It’s a maintenance issue. The DGAC is helping us a lot in our efforts to restore the computer system”. Every day for a week, school officials have been meeting at 1:30 p.m. to review the progress of repairs.
The cyberattack was obviously accompanied by ransomware (ransom demand through a malicious program), but Philippe Joachim claims not to be able to reveal the amount which could be in the millions of euros. .
Mystery about the amount of the ransom
“For the good reason that we did not, for security, open the link which is surely another virus. We were asked not to communicate on this subject. “We clean, we search, the school is gradually returning to normal operation, at least with the students”. Specialists do not give a time frame for a full recovery of computer systems. “Some applications and data sharing are not fully restored,” adds the deputy director.
“All the teams are mobilized, with the assistance of specialized service providers to correct this situation and restore the nominal tools and resources as quickly as possible, specifies Enac on its Linkedin page. However, the operation remains impacted even if circumvention measures make it possible to maintain an activity.
The school to file a complaint
The virus, of unknown origin, has neutralized many applications frequently used by students: the connected objects of the school are infected, the automatic locks no longer work and the printers must be reformatted one by one. The school is not going to stop there which does not wish to give in to the blackmail of the cyberattack. A complaint was lodged with the territorial direction of the judicial police of Toulouse.
Many large companies in the Occitanie region have already borne the brunt of such computer attacks. In the spring of 2021, the laboratories of the pharmaceutical and dermo-cosmetics group Pierre Fabre, which has its headquarters in Castres (Tarn), were the victims of a cyberattack. The hackers claimed a sum of 25 million dollars. Ransom that was never delivered.
The number of cyberattacks multiplied by 4 in 2020
According to the National Agency for Security and Information Systems (Anssi), the number of cyberattacks in France has quadrupled in 2020. “These result in often dramatic consequences for the victims: paralysis of the systems , theft or loss of sensitive data, exposure to singing, etc.
Another sign of this intensification of the cyber threat, the Cybermalveillance.gouv.fr platform recorded a +155% increase in traffic in 2020, all victims combined. Among them, more than 10,000 companies have come to seek assistance there following an attack,” it says on the Bpifrance website. French companies, according to Anssi, are more and more often victims of this type of attack aimed at extracting a ransom from them. In just one year, they have increased by 255%, from 54 attacks reported in 2019 to 192 attacks in 2020.