It's a bit like the mountain that gives birth to a mouse. Three men, aged between 23 and 25, were indicted in Paris for tampering with an automated system and extortion. They are suspected of having hacked the Pole Leonardo da Vinci of La Défense (Hauts-de-Seine) last September against the payment of a ransom of 18,000 euros.
It was on Saturday, September 24, 2022 that the establishment suffered a cyberattack. At 23 p.m., a Twitter message from @Fjset announced the color: "we have access to all your infrastructure and all your data". Clearly, the attackers broke all the defenses of the school's server. They can copy or modify all the information concerning the 8,000 students but also speakers and external partners of this institution which trains engineers and professionals in the multimedia professions. "The hackers had access to a server containing personal data: civil status, contact details, data relating to banking information (IBAN), official and administrative documents, portal access data and academic career data including grades," detailed the management of the Pole in a press release.
At the time Le Parisien had managed to interrogate one of the attackers. "We go to infrastructures that have digital credibility and we do our own cybersecurity checks and it works 95% of the time, then we contact the administrators to discuss the security breach and we take what there is to take, without necessarily being too greedy," FJset explained. without wanting to reveal the amount of his loot.
The school would rather pay than lose everything
To avoid all trouble, management paid a ransom of 18,000 euros in Ethereum cryptocurrency to the digital ransomers. Investigators from the Central Office for the Fight against Cybercrime (OCLCTIC) traced the hackers who engaged in sharing funds and converting them into bitcoins and then euros. These students in computer science were arrested at the beginning of the week in the Paris region before being placed in custody in Nanterre (Hauts-de-Seine). During their hearings, these young people confessed that their motivation was purely villainous.
