One-stop shop for companies: an investigation is opened after the computer attack

An investigation was opened on Friday following last week’s computer attack on the site of the new one-stop-shop for companies launched on January 1 by the economy ministry, the Paris prosecutor’s office said, confirming sources familiar with the investigation.

The Single Window for Business Procedures is an Internet platform that brings together all the administrative procedures for the creation, cessation of activity or modification of the status of a company.

The investigation was opened for violating an automated data processing system and the investigations were entrusted to the cybercrime brigade (BL2C) of the Paris judicial police.

120,000 connections per second

The attack, which occurred between January 3 and 7, caused a saturation of the platform “with 120,000 connections per second produced by a hundred IP addresses,” a Bercy source told AFP.

This is called a denial of service (DDoS) attack. It consists of targeting a computer system by flooding it with messages or connection requests so that it is not available. “It’s not a virus, the structure is not affected at all,” the Bercy source said, adding that the site was “fully operational” now.

The National Institute of Industrial Property (Inpi), administrator of the platform, filed a complaint and requested “the services of a dedicated company that will accompany them in the firewall of these attacks,” according to this same source.

An accountant designed to simplify business administration

Over time, the single window should allow the processing of close to five million administrative procedures per year, which have so far been handled by six networks of business processing centers (CFEs), including those of chambers of commerce and industry, chambers of commerce and crafts, chambers of agriculture, Urssaf, and on the infogreffe site of the commercial courts.

The one-stop shop should allow the creation of a national business registry (RNE), provided for by the 2019 Pact law, to replace the trade and business registry (RCS), but that covers craft, liberal and agricultural activities.

The objective of the Ministry of Economy is to go from 10,000 weekly procedures processed by the new window to 70,000, after a gradual increase in load.