Toulouse city hall still on the spot of a cyberattack, notes an intensification of incidents

At present, the apartment websites at the city hall of Toulouse and Toulouse Metropole have been unavailable for some time.

And it must be acknowledged this phenomenon is worrying, both on the side of the authorities and the inhabitants of this locality. This is nothing more than an immediate consequence of the surge in cybercrime due to the coronavirus pandemic.

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Commenting on the security incident known by the sites of the Toulouse metropolis, Jean-Luc Moudenc was concerned: "This is an extremely serious outage". And that's understandable. Indeed, the outages experienced by the websites of the locality Toulouse have been going on since April 29. Like many public agencies since the beginning of the pandemic, a cyberattack is the cause of this problem. And this is likely to continue if several steps are not taken to curb the advance of cyber-prisoners on this ground. The founder and CEO of Itrust (a Toulouse-based IT security company), Jean Nicolas Piotrowski, said: "We are recording four times as many incidents as in 2019 at the same time." According to him, the most common method used by cyber criminals at this time is phishing: "Sending fraudulent emails to obtain confidential data." A technique that has developed a lot in recent months. In addition, denial of service, which aims to render a network inoperative by saturating it with excessive queries comes in second place. The CEO of the Toulouse firm testifies: "Last month we intervened in a company in northern Toulouse that manufactures masks for health workers and was no longer able to provide them because of this attack." In third place are ransomware. Attacks on the basis of ransom program are very common. Hospitals have been the biggest victims since the progression of coronavirus. Jean Nicolas Piotrowski said he had intervened in two hospitals in the Occitanie region for such a reason. "Malware that encrypted their information system and demanded a certain amount of money to unlock it," he revealed. It does not fail to raise the fact that the danger posed by cyber malice weighs heavily on health facilities. He expects "violent attacks in the next quarter."

In addition, the computer security expert has observed an increase in unsavoury actions by influential groups linked to the American digital giants. "They are lobbying very hard to ensure that medical data and that of French companies in general use their clouds." Says Itrust's boss. This is despite the fact that these services do not guarantee the same margins of confidentiality as European companies.

In addition, another problem has led to the explosion of cyber-malveillance acts: the sudden shift to remote work, which today has become a standard. But, "It was done in haste, without preparation. Not only has the number of faults increased, but the attack surface is also larger, due to the proliferation of media. This will inevitably have security implications in the coming months. recognizes the expert. To effectively combat the spread of computer incidents, COMPUTER security experts have decided to form coalitions to help best combat cyber-protection. Some security solution providers have agreed to make secure devices available free of charge to health care facilities and other businesses. This could include video conferencing programs, security software, server backups, login, messaging and secure file sharing programs. But it is the telework security kits that are the most downloaded by the structures, to the tune of 6,000 acquisitions. Nicolas Piotrowski notes: "Among the structures that have acquired it are many health institutions, but also communities of communes or public bodies."

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