Toulouse: the paralysis of the servers of the national school of civil aviation, who are the culprits?
The National School of Civil Aviation has seen its computer system paralyzed by hackers. Éric Aguilar delivers his analysis on this cyberattack of an unprecedented scale.
The National School of Civil Aviation (Enac) was the victim of a large-scale cyberattack on March 13. The school’s fleet of around 100 aircraft remained grounded for a good week. A virus had infected all the school’s servers, crippling many applications and sharing data. It had taken the support of IT specialists from the General Directorate of Civil Aviation (DGAC) to clean up the entire network.
Read also :
Toulouse: the gendarmes confronted with the geniuses of cyberscams from the Franco-Israeli underworld
The attack was accompanied by a ransom demand, the amount of which was not cancelled, neither the cost of repairs nor possible loss of data. For Eric Aguilar, former policeman and expert in cybercrime, two tracks are to be preferred. “Since there was a ransom demand, I would bet on serious organized crime of which Russia and the Russian-speaking countries are the spearheads. A group of hackers from Eastern European countries had no hesitation in asking the Pierre-Fabre laboratory for 25 million euros…”
Geek looking for a challenge?
But the ex-boss of the financial division of the research section of Toulouse does not exclude that a student wanted to take revenge on the establishment. “It’s a possibility not to be completely ruled out, like that of a young geek who has set himself a challenge”, states the specialist. For him, however, human failure is to be preferred to explain why the cyberattack achieved its objective. “The DGAC is more than up to the task of protecting this type of site. Human error can be clearly defined. A mobile PC not classified by the school may have been connected to the network, or a student or a supervisor has launched an update on an unofficial site. It could also have happened through the hijacking of protected messaging. »