Summary:
France’s national postal service, La Poste, and its banking subsidiary, La Banque Postale, were targeted by a massive Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack. The incident severely disrupted digital operations, knocking websites and mobile applications offline and creating significant logistical bottlenecks during the year's busiest shipping week.

While the attack targeted the availability of services, La Poste confirmed there was no evidence of customer data being compromised. The timing of the attack was strategically chosen to maximize disruption during the peak holiday season.

The outage slowed down parcel distribution networks. Because digital systems were offline, some physical post offices operated at reduced capacity, and many customers were unable to send or collect packages, leading to fears that Christmas gifts would not arrive in time.

Customers of La Banque Postale lost access to online banking and mobile app services. While ATMs and in-store card payments remained functional, the inability to manage accounts online caused significant stress for users during a high-spending period. Physical branches saw increased congestion as customers were forced to perform transactions at counters that were already struggling with limited digital infrastructure.

The attack fueled public frustration on social media, highlighting vulnerabilities in critical national infrastructure during essential periods.

Security Officer Comments:
No single group has officially claimed responsibility for the attack on La Poste, cybersecurity analysts and threat intelligence reports have identified several likely culprits and the likely technical infrastructure used. The scale and timing of the attack align with the activities of the two most dominant botnets of late 2025:

• The Aisuru Botnet: Identified as one of the top botnets of 2025, Aisuru is estimated to have an army of 1 to 4 million infected hosts (primarily compromised IoT devices and routers). In the months leading up to December, it set global records with hyper-volumetric attacks reaching 29.7 Tbps (Terabits per second).
• The Kimwolf Botnet: A newer, sophisticated botnet discovered just weeks before the La Poste attack. It has hijacked an estimated 1.8 million Android TVs and set-top boxes. Kimwolf is technically linked to the Aisuru group and uses advanced "EtherHiding" techniques (using Ethereum Name Service domains) to keep its command-and-control servers online despite takedown attempts.

Security researchers have noted that the attack on La Poste was not isolated. On the same day (December 22), other major French financial institutions, including Caisse d’Epargne and Banque Populaire, also reported digital disruptions. This pattern is characteristic of a coordinated campaign by pro-Russian or pro-Palestinian hacktivist coalitions.

• NoName057(16): This group remains the most active DDoS threat to France in 2025. They typically target critical infrastructure in European countries that support Ukraine. They operate through the DDOSIA project, which crowdsources attack power from volunteers.
• The "Holy League" Coalition: Reports from late 2025 mention a coalition of hacktivist groups (including NoName, Cyber Lami, and Red Wolf Cyber) that have been targeting French infrastructure under the "Holy League" banner, specifically aiming at high-visibility targets during major holidays like Christmas.

While La Poste has not released the exact throughput (Gbps) of the December 22 event, technical characteristics shared by French telecom sources suggest:

• A "carpet-bombing" DDoS attack, which targets a wide range of IP addresses simultaneously to bypass traditional "scrubbing" defenses.
• The initial "hard" outage lasted over 8 to 10 hours, with intermittent service instability continuing into December 23.
• Based on the total blackout of both the postal and banking mobile apps, it is believed to be a multi-terabit attack, consistent with the hyper-volumetric capabilities shown by the Aisuru botnet earlier that year.

Suggested Corrections:

Immediate Actions Taken:

• Technical Mobilization: La Poste deployed emergency technical teams to "scrub" malicious traffic and restore digital services.
• Service Continuity: To maintain operations, the bank prioritized SMS-based authentication for online payments to bypass app-based hurdles, and physical branches remained open for manual transactions.
• Transparent Communication: The organization issued prompt statements to clarify that the event was a DDoS attack rather than a data breach, helping to prevent a secondary panic regarding identity theft.

Recommended Long-Term Suggested Correctionss:

• Advanced DDoS Protection: Implementing or scaling cloud-based DDoS mitigation services (such as Cloudflare, Akamai, or AWS Shield) that can automatically detect and reroute "junk" traffic before it reaches the origin servers.
• Elastic Infrastructure: Utilizing auto-scaling cloud environments that can handle sudden surges in traffic, whether legitimate (holiday shopping) or malicious (DDoS).
• Redundancy and Failover: Ensuring that critical backend logistics systems are decoupled from public-facing websites so that a website outage does not paralyze physical sorting and delivery operations.
• Geoblocking and Rate Limiting: Implementing stricter traffic filtering during peak seasons, such as blocking traffic from regions that do not typically use La Poste services or setting aggressive rate limits for API requests.

Link(s):
https://therecord.media/la-poste-france-ddos-disruption-days-before-christmas