During several hours on Thursday, Mediapart was the target of a Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) computer attack which had the effect of blocking or slowing down access to the website, but without any intrusion inside our systems.
Responsibility for the attack was claimed by a group of hackers associated with , a person who presents himself as a Zionist militant and who is reportedly based in Israel. The claims were made in a series of phone calls to Mediapart and French rolling TV news stations BFMTV and iTélé, and also on the website ViolVocal.
Mediapart filed an official complaint over this attack against freedom of information on Friday.
Chelli, a Franco-Israeli who uses the alias Ulcan, is already the subject of several judicial investigations. One concerns a phone call made in early August to the parents of a journalist from French news website Rue89 in which he claimed that their son had died, apparently in retaliation for an article whose contents displeased him. He then reported to police that a homicide had been committed at the home of the journalist’s parents, where officers were sent to investigate. Five days later, the journalist’s father was the victim of a heart attack and is currently in hospital where he has been placed in an artificial coma.
Chelli also impersonated Rue89 co-founder Pierre Haski in a call to police in which he pretended to confess to having killed his partner, prompting police to urgently send officers to the journalist’s home. A similar hoax recently targeted the French Holocaust denier Robert Faurisson (a recording of the call made to the police can be found here).
An article by Haski detailing the incidents can be found (in French) here, and a recording of a phone call made by Ulcan to the Rue89 journalist whose family were the target of the hoax calls can be found here.
The pseudo-hacker, whose motives for the attacks remains uncertain, was recently responsible for computer attacks against the websites of the French CGT trades union and the French government’s regional planning agency, Datar, which were saturated by robot computer activity.
Following the complaints lodged by Rue89, the CGT and Datar, the Paris public prosecutor’s office opened an investigation on August 8th against persons unknown for the fraudulent invasion and modification of data systems. Following individual complaints by several Rue89 journalists, it has also opened a parallel preliminary investigation into the proffering of death threats, the making of malicious phone calls, the false reporting of a crime and identity theft.
Ulcan has gained private addresses and telephone numbers by passing himself off as a police officer. In one notable case, in a phone call in which he allegedly used words common to police jargon and cited phone numbers used by the police administration, he persuaded police services in northern France to provide him with information about the criminal records two people listed on confidential files. A formal complaint over the incident was lodged with the Lille public prosecutor’s office on august 5th. A similar incident is now the subject of an investigation by the public prosecutor’s office in Nanterre, close to Paris. More recently, he was reportedly behind a call to police in Besançon, eastern France, falsely alerting police to a rape in the town centre.
The serious consequences of Ulcan’s activities has prompted the French interior ministry to issue a warning notice to police stations around France in which they are urged to show caution if a caller sounds suspicious, and notably to call numbers back. The interior ministry has said there are no grounds to suspect that any police officers were complicit in the incidents.
According to police and diplomatic sources, the French police sent a request several weeks ago to Israeli police authorities for confirmation that Grégory Chelli is currently living in Israel. No response had been received by August 22nd.
In July 2009, a Paris court handed Chelli a four-month suspended prison sentence for his part in the violent raid and ransacking of Résistances, a militant bookshop and debating centre in the capital which is active in promoting the cause of an independent Palestine.