PARIS
With France’s presidential election less than four months away, political parties have been urged to practise “digital hygiene” to avoid cyberattacks, Defence Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian said yesterday.
He said in an interview after US intelligence on Friday accused Russia of being behind hacking attacks on Hillary Clinton’s election campaign, Le Drian said France’s digital security service had detected no “signs of operations aimed at destabilising the French elections.”
However, he told the Journal du Dimanche, such operations “cannot be ruled out”.
The minister said officials of France’s main political parties met with the digital security service in October to learn how to detect and prevent hacking attacks. “It’s up to them now to apply rigorously what the experts call digital hygiene,” Le Drian said.
“You have to accept that in principle every email that is sent can be pirated and made public with the aim of destabilisation,” he said.
Asked whether he believed that Russia was behind attacks on the US Democratic Party, he said: “If there was an action to influence or manipulate the US presidential election ...[that was] carried out by a state government it would be intolerable interference.”
The minister also said that external cyber attacks targeting the French military double each year, adding France blocked 24,000 of them in 2016.
Asked whether France was safe from such attacks, Le Drian replied: “Obviously not, one mustn’t be naive.”
At Le Drian’s initiative, France is setting up a command for cyber operations, Cybercom, which will employ 2,600 “digital fighters” by 2019.
