Cyberattack Disrupts French Postal Operations as Pro-Russian Group Claims Responsibility

France’s national postal service, La Poste, experienced a significant disruption to its digital infrastructure this week after a large-scale cyberattack temporarily disabled key systems during the peak holiday delivery period. A pro-Russian hacking collective later claimed responsibility for the incident, according to French authorities.

The attack, identified as a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) operation, forced central IT systems offline on Monday, preventing postal employees from tracking parcels and causing interruptions to online payment services linked to La Poste’s banking division. As of Wednesday morning, parts of the system had not yet been fully restored.

Responsibility for the attack was claimed by the hacker group Noname057, which has previously been linked to a series of cyber operations targeting European institutions. Following the claim, France’s domestic intelligence service, DGSI, assumed control of the investigation, the Paris prosecutor’s office confirmed.

The disruption comes at a critical time for La Poste, which handles billions of mail items and parcels annually and employs more than 200,000 people nationwide. The outage coincided with one of the busiest logistics periods of the year, amplifying its operational impact.

French authorities view the incident within a broader pattern of hostile cyber activity attributed to Russia-aligned actors. France and its European partners argue that such attacks form part of a wider “hybrid warfare” strategy aimed at destabilizing public services, exhausting security resources, and weakening political support for Ukraine. In recent years, European investigators have documented hundreds of similar incidents involving cyberattacks, disinformation campaigns, and acts of sabotage across the region.