CYBERSECURITY
PEERING
RESILIENCE
After the ANTS hack, a “cyber blackout” test: what would keep working?
The French Prime Minister has just announced a “cyber blackout” test in response to the hack of ANTS. And it immediately raises a question: what would keep working?
On 13 April 2026, ANTS (the French National Agency for Secure Documents) noticed unusual activity on its systems. After investigation, between 12 and 18 million records turned out to have been extracted and put up for sale on specialist forums.
Behind this feat was a 15-year-old minor, known by the alias “breach3d”, who easily accessed the data.
And that is the whole problem: experts describe the technique used as “child’s play”.
We are not talking about a sophisticated nation-state attack, but about a teenager. An event that must be taken as a wake-up call about the state of our public cybersecurity.
And it was taken seriously, as shown by the Prime Minister’s reaction and speech.
Among the measures announced: testing a “cyber blackout”. Simulating a large-scale Internet outage to map what holds, what falls, and what we do not yet know.
France has never carried out this test at full scale.
If done seriously, this test will reveal dependencies nobody has mapped yet: critical services that assume a permanent connection to servers, infrastructures with no local plan B…
Peering is precisely what keeps the country running even if it is cut off from the global internet. It is not the answer to everything, but it addresses part of the problem.
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