Cyber Incident Victim: Ambérieu-en-Bugey
Date:
Apr 2023
Location:
France
Summary
The official website of Ambérieu-en-Bugey was compromised in a cyberattack, rendering it inaccessible to the public. The attack targeted the city's external hosting provider and not its internal municipal IT system. While the primary website was taken offline, a separate portal for family services remained accessible. The incident caused significant disruption to residents who rely on the site for digital services, including access to urban planning documents.
| CIA Posture | Motives | Tactics, Techniques & Procedures |
|---|---|---|
| Available to members | 1 motive | 1 technique |
| Threat Actors | Type | Location |
|---|---|---|
| 0 actors | Available to members | Available to members |
Description
On or around May 1st, 2023, the official website of the town of Ambérieu-en-Bugey, `ville-amberieuenbugey.fr`, became the target of a cyberattack. The incident was publicly confirmed on Tuesday, May 2nd, when residents found the website completely inaccessible. The disruption to the municipal website was not the result of a compromise of the town's own internal computer systems. Instead, the attack was directed at the town's external hosting provider. Municipal officials, including Mayor Daniel Fabre, were notified of the situation by the provider on the evening of Tuesday, May 2nd. The initial information provided to the town was limited, leaving officials without a clear timeline for restoration or detailed information about the nature of the attack on their service provider.
The primary and most immediate impact of the incident was the complete denial of service for the main municipal website. This outage prevented citizens from accessing the digital services and information hosted on the platform. The town administration quickly utilized its official Facebook page as an alternative channel for public communication. Through a post on this social media platform, the municipality acknowledged the cyberattack and provided a crucial piece of information to mitigate the disruption: while the main site was down, a separate service known as the ‘Portail Famille’ (Family Portal) remained accessible via a direct subdomain link, `famille.ville-amberieuenbugey.fr`. This indicated that the attack's impact was potentially contained to specific systems or servers within the host's infrastructure, leaving this particular subdomain unaffected and operational.
The inability to access the main website had significant practical consequences for the community, as highlighted by Mayor Fabre. The town's digital transformation efforts meant that numerous public services had been entirely dematerialized, making the website the sole point of access for certain administrative functions. One specific example cited was the processing of urban planning dossiers. Citizens seeking to submit or check on planning applications were unable to do so through the normal digital channel for the duration of the outage. The mayor expressed concern that a prolonged disruption from the hosting provider would be highly problematic for all residents relying on these now-inaccessible online services, effectively halting certain municipal administrative processes.
This incident involving Ambérieu-en-Bugey was not an isolated event in the broader regional context of cyber threats during this period. The article notes that just a few days prior, on Saturday, April 29th, the website of the nearby town of Reyrieux had also been targeted by a cyberattack. Furthermore, earlier in the same month, beginning in early April, a more severe cyberattack had targeted the Centre hospitalier de Bourg-en-Bresse. That attack had a much wider scope, compromising the entire computer network of the Bourg-en-Bresse hospital. The impact also extended to other medical establishments managed by the same direction, including hospitals in Hauteville, Pont-de-Vaux, and Meximieux, as well as nursing homes (EHPADs) in Montrevel-en-Bresse, Coligny, and Cerdon. This pattern suggests a heightened level of malicious cyber activity targeting public sector entities in the Ain department throughout April and May 2023.
The response from the town of Ambérieu-en-Bugey was necessarily limited due to the nature of the attack being against a third-party provider. The primary response action was crisis communication, achieved by swiftly informing the public of the situation through an alternative online platform, Facebook. This communication served to provide transparency about the cause of the outage and offered a workaround for accessing the still-functional Family Portal. The town's administration was placed in a reactive posture, dependent on its hosting provider for further information, investigation, and ultimately, the restoration of service. As stated by the mayor, the municipality had no information on the next steps or a potential resolution timeline at the time of the initial reporting, underscoring their reliance on the external vendor's incident response capabilities. The technical investigation into the breach, including its root cause, the extent of the compromise within the host's infrastructure, and any potential data exfiltration, would fall to the hosting provider, with details potentially relayed to the town at a later stage.