France's spy agency has been fingered as the likely author of complex reconnaissance malware, researchers say.
The Casper malware is one of a handful with links to the Babar spy program which leaked NSA documents revealed last month to be the handiwork of France's Direction Générale de la Sécurité Extérieure (General Directorate for External Security or DGSE).
In 2012, French blogger, activist, and businessman Olivier Laurelli sat down at his computer. It automatically connected to his VPN on boot (he owns a small security services company, called Toonux, which was providing a connection via a Panamanian IP address) and began surfing the Web.
Orange customers in France could see a spike in phishing attempts after hackers nabbed hundreds of thousands of customers' unencrypted personal data in an attack on the operator's website.
Hackers accessed the personal data of three percent of Orange's customers in France, the company confirmed, using the 'My Account' section of orange.fr.
France's data protection watchdog moved closer to fining Google for the way it stores and tracks user information after the search engine ignored a three-month ultimatum to bring its practices in line with local law.
The privacy watchdog, known as CNIL, said on Friday it was opening a procedure to impose formal sanctions. Under French law, Google can be fined up to 150,000 euros.
Edward Snowden's revelations about American communications snoopery have inspired newspapers around the world to investigate domestic spying, the latest of which is Le Monde in France.
The newspaper's exposé (French language) finds that French citizens' communications are just as thoroughly trawled as those in America.
France's first electronic election has turned into a farce with reports coming in of the sort of election rigging that you would expect from third world countries like Afghanistan, Zimbabwe or the USA.
An "online-primary" claimed as "fraud-proof" and as "ultra secure" as the Maginot Line, has turned out to be vulnerable to a Blizkrieg of multiple and fake voting.
A French experiment in cracking down on digital media piracy by threatening to kick copyright cheats offline is about to end — without solving the problem.
A French appeals court on Wednesday threw out a 1.5 million euro ($2 million) fine against energy giant EDF, overturning a lower court's ruling that the company had been complicit in hacking the computers of Greenpeace in 2006.
EDF had appealed against the November 2011 decision by the Nanterre criminal court that a company it hired had hacked into confidential information on the computer of Yannick Jadot, then campaign director for the environmental group and now a Greens member of the European Parliament.
The French news magazine L'Express has reported that in May computers in the offices of France's then-president Nicolas Sarkozy were attacked by Flame, the malware jointly developed by the US and Israel to collect information on the Iranian nuclear program, and that staff at the Elysee Palace covered up the attack. "Hackers have not only managed to get to the heart of French political power," L'Express reported, "but they were able to search the computers of close advisers of Nicolas Sarkozy."
In 2010, French authorities instated a group of bureaucrats whose purpose was to enforce copyright protection on the Internet in France. The group, called Hadopi, was in charge of enforcing the law of the same name, which would take requests from rights holders for take downs when someone with a French IP address tried to download a P2P file containing illegally procured media.
