France in Moscow’s sights? Although France has been the victim of cyberattacks for several weeks, the National Office for Veterans and War Victims is also affected. Hackers attacked ONACVG’s servers, software, and databases.
It took the army services a month to stop this attack, but this is the first time that an entity of the Ministry of the Armed Forces has been attacked in this way.
The data of the French soldiers in the sights of Moscow
According to information from BFMTV, the hackers got very close to a sensitive file: the fighter’s card. The Prosecutor’s Office has filed a complaint, the investigation is ongoing and the ministry has not officially communicated on this point.
The document is currently in the hands of “several hundred thousand people in France” and contains “personal data”, according to Colonel Michel Goya, a defense consultant for BFMTV.
Thanks to the information contained in the file, in particular the telephone numbers of combatants and former soldiers, the Russians could have come into contact with members of the French army.
Something to worry about from the Grande Muette. Vice Admiral Patrick Chevallereau sounds the alarm by evoking “former French soldiers (who) contribute to the interests of the Kremlin,” in a column published Thursday in the JDD.
High-ranking officers as Kremlin relays
Among the men suspected of having close ties to Moscow: Colonel Jacques Hogard, very active on social networks and who regularly shares tweets from the Russian embassy in France, or Colonel Alain Corvez, who was one of the observers sent to Donbass, in eastern Ukraine, to oversee Russian-organized annexation referendums, the validity of which has been widely questioned by many experts.
There is also the lieutenant colonel of the gendarmerie and member of the National Group (RN) Jean-Michel Cadenas. The soldier did not hesitate to post a message on Twitter in which he claimed that the French ambassador to Ukraine had resigned, which was completely false.
The ex-soldier Xavier Moreau, who has become a spokesman for the Kremlin, is also added to the list. He became a Russian citizen, according to challengesbroadcast Vladimir Putin’s speech through a Youtube channel, closed at the end of 2022.
“Technical credibility” for Russia
But why such recruitment into the ranks of the French army? According to some experts, these soldiers serve as spokesmen for Moscow. “It gives a certain military technical credibility to which we grant a form of legitimacy to a hidden agenda that sometimes, voluntarily or involuntarily, serves the interests of the Kremlin,” Patrick Chevallereau, a member of the Open Diplomacy Institute, estimates with BFMTV.
The Russian cyberattack is yet another example of Moscow’s hybrid warfare.
Source: BFM TV
