ISIL-linked hackers seize control of French television network

Hackers claiming allegiance to the Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) seized control of TV5 Monde, a global French television network on Wednesday night, simultaneously blacking out 11 channels and taking over the network's website and social media accounts.

The attack, which the network’s director, Yves Bigot, described as “extremely powerful,” appeared to be an unprecedented step in the armed group’s information warfare tactics.

The hackers, who dubbed themselves ISIL’s “Cybercaliphate” replaced TV5 Monde’s webpage with a message blaming French President François Hollande for supporting U.S.-led airstrikes against the group.

“Hollande, you’ve made a great mistake,” the message read. “You send your military to serve sneaky American kuffar [infidels] in a footless war with our brothers.”

Bigot told RTL radio on Thursday that TV5 Monde has restored its signal but could broadcast only recorded programs.

ISIL has claimed responsibility for complex hackings before, but experts and a French official said the ability to black out a global television network represented a new level of sophistication for the group. The Paris prosecutor’s office said Thursday it has opened an investigation into the attack.

Bigot said he was shaken when he saw the black screen across the network’s broadcasts “and when we discovered the sense of the message appearing on our social media and our websites, it both allowed us to understand what was happening and obviously worried us.”

Hackers claiming to work on behalf of ISIL have seized control of the Twitter accounts of other media, including Newsweek’s, and in January hacked into the Twitter page and YouTube channel of the U.S. military’s Central Command.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls, on his Twitter account, called Wednesday’s attack “an unacceptable insult to freedom of information and expression,” and French government ministers visited TV5 Monde’s Paris headquarters on Thursday.

TV5 Monde, which was founded by the French government in 1984 and calls itself the “worldwide French cultural channel,” broadcasts news and other programs produced in France, Belgium, Switzerland and Canada. Its Facebook page says its signal reaches more than 257 million homes in over 200 countries and territories.

After the January attacks on French satirical weekly Charlie Hebdo and a Paris supermarket by gunmen claiming allegiance to ISIL, officials said hackers had targeted some 19,000 French websites. William Reymond, the editor of the French investigative website Breaking3zero, which traced the January hackings, said the latest attack can be directly linked to ISIL operatives — one in Algeria who built the malicious software used in the attack and another in Iraq who helped launch it.

Within 30 minutes, Reymond said, the malware had exploited a weakness in the channel's computer system and taken over its central transmission server, preventing the signal from being beamed to a satellite. He said TV5 Monde would have a hard time regaining full control.

“They have to erase everything. There were at least three other encrypted viruses,” he said.

A French security official, speaking on condition of anonymity, said investigators would examine whether the attackers had found a hole in TV5 Monde’s information defense systems that was left unguarded or whether those systems failed outright, which he said would be a more worrying development.

Al Jazeera and The Associated Press