Security News > 2010 > July > Hackers clone French Foreign Ministry website
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/europe/hackers-clone-french-foreign-ministry-website-2027716.html By John Lichfield Independent.co.uk 16 July 2010 France yesterday suffered what might be called a bad web day. A pirate internet site, looking for all the world like the official Foreign Ministry site, began bombarding the world with bogus declarations and announcements. At the same time a long-awaited official site, which is supposed to present a can-do image of France to investors and tourists, collapsed on its first day. The French foreign ministry announced that â if it could find them â it would take legal action against the web pirates who have created an elaborate clone of official French diplomacy on the internet. The bogus site, www.diplomatiegov.fr, or France Diplo TV, has stolen the logo and style and many of the video contents of the official site, www.diplomatie.gouv.fr. It has also added a series of diplomatic initiatives that never were, including a purported decision by Paris to repay the "90 million gold francs" which Haiti paid France in post-independence reparations from 1825 to 1947. The lead video item on the hoax site yesterday was a film of a young, pompous woman in spectacles, sitting in front of French and EU flags. [...]