A major cyber attack occurred against France’s National Postal Service, La Poste, in the first week of January. The DDoS was so large that it stopped all of La Poste’s nationwide online services. The type of attack has yet to be disclosed; however, La Poste stated that the attack began on January 1st and simultaneously disrupted many of La Poste’s online services.
A great inconvenience to online services, even though the data wasn’t compromised
Although La Poste stated that no customer data was breached during the attack, due to the scale of the disruption, many people and businesses that rely on La Poste’s online services experienced great inconvenience due to the outage.
DDoS attacks work by flooding a server with a massive amount of requests, so much that the server becomes unable to process legitimate user requests. The attackers behind the La Poste attack launched an organized DDoS attack from multiple entry points into La Poste’s system, thus causing the company to take many of its systems offline to mitigate the effects of the attack.
According to reports, the volume of the attack was at record levels compared to previous DDoS attacks in France
As a result of the attack, La Poste’s cybersecurity team had to work around-the-clock to get many of the services back up and running. In order to do this, the team used advanced filtering tools to filter out malicious traffic and routed legitimate traffic through safe channels. Many of the online services were restored within 48 hours of the attack.
Holiday season delays and order fulfillment affecting businesses
The fact that the attack occurred during the holiday season made things worse for thousands of customers who could not track their packages or receive delivery updates. Also, many businesses experienced delays in receiving and shipping goods due to the La Poste outage. Additionally, e-commerce companies that rely on La Poste to deliver packages for them experienced problems fulfilling orders.
Although the outage created a lot of problems for La Poste’s customers, the company wanted to reassure them that their financial information and personal data were secure. La Poste stated that the purpose of the attack was solely to create a service outage and not to steal customer data.
La Poste has taken steps to increase the security of its online services and prevent another outage
To accomplish this, La Poste increased the bandwidth of its internet connections, installed new systems designed to mitigate DDoS attacks, and strengthened its relationships with cybersecurity firms. Additionally, La Poste has stated that it plans to conduct a complete review of its online infrastructure to determine where it may be vulnerable to future cyber attacks.
The attack highlights the need for national infrastructure to be prepared for cyber attacks
If preventive measures are not taken to protect these systems, analysts predict that similar attacks may occur against other sectors, including banking, transportation, and healthcare.
In addition to taking steps to protect its own systems, La Poste has pledged to spend a lot of money in 2026 to improve the cybersecurity of its systems, including improving its ability to detect and respond quickly to potential cyber threats.
La Poste is also working closely with the French government to identify the source of the attack, although identifying the source of a DDoS attack is often difficult. While the majority of services offered by La Poste have returned to normal, the experience has highlighted the vulnerability of digital systems, especially those that are critical to providing services to consumers and businesses. Therefore, as reliance on digital platforms continues to grow, protecting the reliability of these systems against cyber threats will remain a top priority for both businesses and governments.
