The platform was saturated for several days. An investigation was opened on Friday after the computer attack last week against the site of the new one-stop shop for businesses launched on January 1 by the Ministry of the Economy, the Paris prosecutor’s office said, confirming sources close to the investigation. .
The one-stop shop for business formalities is an Internet platform bringing together all the administrative procedures for the creation, cessation of activity or modification of the status of a company.
“The counter was opened a week ago and a lot of requests came all of a sudden to bug it,” one of the sources close to the investigation commented on Tuesday.
Thousands of connections per second
The investigation was opened for breaching an automated data processing system and the investigations were entrusted to the cybercrime brigade (BL2C) of the Paris judicial police.
The attack, which occurred between January 3 and 7, resulted in a saturation of the platform “with 120,000 connections per second produced by a hundred IP addresses”, explained to AFP a spring in Bercy.
This is called a Denial of Service (DDoS) attack. This consists of targeting a computer system by flooding it with messages or connection requests to make it unavailable. “It’s not a virus, the structure is not affected at all,” said the source at Bercy, adding that the site was “fully operational” now.
Complaint filed by the Inpi
The National Institute of Industrial Property (Inpi), manager of the platform, filed a complaint and called on “the services of a dedicated company which will accompany them in the firewall of these attacks”, according to this same source. .
The one-stop shop should eventually make it possible to process nearly five million administrative formalities each year, which until now have been handled by six networks of business formalities centers (CFE), including those of chambers of commerce and industry, chambers of trades and crafts, chambers of agriculture, Urssaf, and on the infogreffe site of the commercial courts.
The one-stop shop should allow the creation of a national register of companies (RNE), provided for by the Pacte law of 2019, replacing the register of commerce and companies (RCS), while encompassing craft, liberal and agricultural activities. The objective of the Ministry of the Economy is to go from 10,000 formalities per week processed by the new counter to 70,000, after a gradual increase in load.