Bonum Certa Men Certa

Web Site of French Senator Richard Yung Cracked Just Days After Criticising the EPO

The statement posted by Yung before his site got cracked (via Google Cache, which still prevails)

Richard Yung site before crack
A "snapshot of the page as it appeared on Feb 22, 2017 14:09:52 GMT." (Google Cache)



Richard YungSummary: A French politician finds himself red-faced after criticising the EPO, as his site gets flagged as malicious, gets blocked, and his blog post (speech) about the EPO vanishes

MR. Richard Yung has been in politics for a long time. He also has a pretty decent Web site with a good mobile version, alternating backgrounds etc. We wouldn't classify his site as something shoddy.



Previously, a Croatian site that was rather prominent in its criticism of Battistelli's 'bulldog' got cracked, whereupon we decided to preserve some of its content (especially critical documents about Battistelli's 'bulldog'). Later on, perhaps just months apart, SUEPO and us came under DDOS attacks (it happened to us several more times over the years, in addition to tens of millions of cracking attempts). We are not suggesting that Yung's site was targeted in connection with the EPO (we linked to his site just before the crack and shortly afterwards, just after we received nasty warnings for attempting to access the site). We are just pointing out what is known. SUEPO noticed the same thing and wrote about it, at one point bypassing his site and linking directly to the video from the French government.

“The EPO would not hesitate to state this. I was informed on good authority that this was a hacking incident and apparently it has been confirmed by Senator Yung himself.”
      --Anonymous
"Dubious incident," one reader of ours called it, as "Senator Richard Yung's website got attacked and hacked [...] FYI, Last Friday SUEPO published the article "[Richard Yung] Question orale sur la dégradation du climat social au sein de l'OEB: réponse du Gouvernement - Richard Yung, senateur des francais de l'etranger" on their website under the column "February 2017 press articles" however I noticed when clicking on the link the following warning message was generated: “malicious website” , “website may harm your computer” and “This is a known dangerous website. It is recommended that you do NOT visit this site.”"

We noticed the same thing. I was aware of it and I actually wrote to him about it. I was unable to confirm whether he really got cracked or just simply restored from a recent backup that did not have his most recent posts (the latest post was missing at the time, yielding a "page not found" error).

We did some informal asking around, for no politician likes to publicly admit carelessness, defacement, sabotage etc. (unless it's Battistelli, in which case even mild tampering with a bicycle is gigantic news and a prelude to a national emergency at Eponia).

“I heard from a reliable source which requires not to be identified that Yung's site had been attacked with a technique that makes it referenced as a dangerous site by Google, hence the blockade that we all experienced (even from within the French Senat !”
      --Anonymous intermediary
One person told us that "other people confirmed this incident. I did some investigations on the same day and found out that Yung's website was available however the article including the video about the parliamentary question on the social climate of the European Patent Office had miraculously vanished. Pure coincidence? The EPO would not hesitate to state this. I was informed on good authority that this was a hacking incident and apparently it has been confirmed by Senator Yung himself."

We asked this reader to ask around for any more information about it because we needed an absolutely undeniable statement. Yung seems tight-lipped about it; he didn't respond to me.

We were waiting and waiting for more input and eventually we received this:

Yung apparently confirmed the hack to my contact, however I need to double check it. Would be nice to have a written statement about this. I'm on it and let you know asap ;)

[...]

Here is the reply from an intermediary:

"I heard from a reliable source which requires not to be identified that Yung's site had been attacked with a technique that makes it referenced as a dangerous site by Google, hence the blockade that we all experienced (even from within the French Senat !"


That is all the information that we have at the moment. It would be valuable to know what this technique actually was as here in Techrights the cracking attempts habitually speed up to the point where they choke our back-end servers, with nearly 100 attempts per second (these attempts were previously traced back to Chinese networks).

"It's hard to believe in coincidence," one person wrote about this, "but it's even harder to believe in anything else."

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