France’s Directorate General of Public Finances (DGFiP) has disclosed a data breach impacting approximately 680,000 individuals. The breach was revealed after a threat actor claimed on a hacking forum to have accessed DGFiP’s internal systems and exfiltrated data.
According to DGFiP, the unauthorized access occurred in June and July, and was halted immediately upon detection. However, at that time, the agency did not find evidence of data exfiltration. It was only last week that DGFiP confirmed the attackers had used compromised credentials from an employee and a third-party account to access its systems and steal information from 678,000 users.
The compromised data includes reference tax income, withholding tax rates, company names, unique identifiers, and cadastral data related to real estate addresses and surfaces. Importantly, no usernames or passwords were compromised in this incident, which has been reported to France’s data protection authority, CNIL.
DGFiP is continuing to investigate the breach’s nature and scope, as well as the exact number of affected individuals, and plans to contact each one directly. This incident follows closely on the heels of another cyberattack on Romania’s National Agency for Cadastre and Property Registration (ANCPI), which was reportedly targeted by a threat actor known as ByteToBreach.
For further details, see the full report by SecurityWeek.
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