The incident followed other recent cyberattacks involving French public institutions.

Tax data belonging to around 678,000 French individuals and businesses was stolen in a cyberattack on the country’s tax authority in June and July, France’s government has said.

The country’s finance ministry last Friday (14 August) confirmed the hack of the Directorate-General for Public Finance (DGFIP) conducted by what it called a “malicious actor” gaining “illegal access” to information systems through “the usurpation of identifiers of a DGFIP agent and an authorised third party”.

The ministry said that investigations conducted since 12 August, when the actor declared their behaviour, have established that the intruder(s) accessed and extracted data such as reference tax incomes, family quotients, withholding tax rates, company names and corporate tax numbers. Data relating to addresses and sizing of real estate was also compromised.

The DGFIP said it will this week directly contact those concerned by email or post, specifying which data relevant to them may have been compromised and, if applicable, what measures they need to take in response.

The authority said that “public finance areas of private and professional users” or “passwords of individuals and professionals” had not been compromised in the cyberattack. It added that the sophisticated nature of the attack meant that data theft had not initially been evident even after interruptive counter-measures were brought to bear following detection of the hack.

The matter was referred to France’s data protection commissioner upon detection of the data theft and an investigation is now underway in conjunction with the country’s cybersecurity agency and national security governmental department.

The incident followed other recent cyberattacks involving French public institutions, including on systems linked to the country’s national secure documents and statistics agencies, and a database of French citizens’ banking details.

Last month, in the UK, the two men responsible for the 2024 cyberattack on Transport for London were each sentenced to five and a half years in prison.

In the private sphere, recent notable hacking incidents include a ransomware group stealing and posting images of Apple’s upcoming iPhone 18 Pro after an attack on the tech giant’s Indian supplier Tata Electronics, and the ShinyHunters group stealing data from the education management platform Canvas before agreeing to settlement terms with its parent company Instructure.

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