A cybersecurity conference in Monaco has heard that hackers who succeeded in taking down a major French television station last year are still making efforts to break into French government computers, a senior cybersecurity official said Wednesday.

Guillaume Poupard, who heads the National Agency of Security and Information Systems (ANSSI), told the Associated Press that sensors deployed at French government ministries routinely pick up the electronic signatures associated with the group.
“The group behind it – and I don’t know who it is, that’s not my role – is proving very active,” he said. “We see them. And we stop them.”
The April 8, 2015, attack interrupted nearly a dozen channels belonging to TV5 and packed its social media sites with propaganda for the Islamic State group. The cyber attack just months after the Charlie Hebdo atrocity caused considerable consternation among French leaders and journalists.
French Prime Minister Manuel Valls at the time condemned what he called an “unacceptable attack on freedom of expression”. Some journalists described the hack as an “unprecedented act of cyberterrorism”.
But two months later, L’Express magazine reported that French investigators believed a Russian group masquerading as Islamic State loyalists had carried out the hack. Mr Poupard would not be drawn on the thesis that Moscow is behind these sophisticated attacks, but added that the attack on TV5 “looked a lot like” the cyber-espionage operation launched in May 2015 against Germany’s parliament. Germany’s domestic intelligence agency blamed that hack squarely on Moscow.
Monaco has recently announced that its own cyber security agency has started work to help protect the Principality against security breaches.