UNPRECEDENTED INTERNET ATTACK

According to experts outside ICANN, hackers target governments as well as intelligence or police services, airlines or the oil industry in the Middle East or Europe. One of them believes that these attacks originated in Iran.

Essentially, these attacks consist of "replacing server addresses" authorized "by addresses of machines controlled by attackers," said the organization. This allows hackers to delve into the data (passwords, email addresses ...) on the way or to completely capture the traffic to their servers.

Based in California, ICANN manages the online domain name system that the general public knows in the form of .com or .fr site addresses, for example. It is precisely the system of domain names ("Domain Name System", DNS) - which allows to connect a computer to a website - that attack the hackers, unidentified.

These names work a little like the telephone operators of yesteryear, who connected the interlocutors to each other by connecting cables to a circuit. DNS attacks, nicknamed "DNSpionnage", "are basically like someone who goes to the post office, places it on your address, reads your mail and then puts it in your mailbox", The US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) also recently explained the attacks, the first of which would be at least 2017.

ICANN advocates deploying a protection protocol called Domain Name System Security Extensions (DNSSEC). But the miracle solution does not seem to exist yet to counter these attacks. "There is no single tool to solve this," warned David Conrad of ICANN. "We need to improve the overall security of the DNS if we want to have any hope of preventing such attacks," he added.

Indeed, computer attacks, of any size and of any kind, have multiplied at an exponential rate in recent years. According to experts, hackers most often belong to two main categories: individuals or groups of "hackers" who want to earn money or states, who want to spy on other countries.

According to experts and authorities, many countries, the United States, China, Russia, Iran or North Korea are particularly active in piracy, which deny the interested parties.