French taxpayers' data stolen in hack of Finance Ministry

The scenario has become all too familiar: A hacker claims responsibility for an attack on a government system, followed by the authorities confirming that personal data for which they were responsible has indeed been stolen. That was once again the case on Wednesday, August 12.

Early in the afternoon, a hacker posted on a forum used by cybercriminals, claiming to have accessed data from one of the main and most sensitive departments within France's Finance Ministry, the tax authority, known as DGFiP. The department notably manages the online tax platform – the hacker's target. The stolen data was offered up for sale, without a specified price. On Thursday evening, the ministry confirmed in a press release it had suffered a cyberattack and a data leak.

The sequence of events proves embarrassing for the ministry. Officials admitted that the hacker's access to their network was cut off "at the end of June" during a "routine check," but the data extraction was not detected. This partially matched the hacker's claim of having accessed an "internal tool" at the DGFiP through a VPN, a system that can be used for remote access to IT networks. "We were disconnected pretty quickly. The government hasn't mentioned the intrusion at all, despite clearly seeing that we were [extracting data]," the hacker wrote.