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A cyber attack on a French government agency has resulted in the data of 43 million people being leaked.
The France Travail, the government agency responsible for dealing with the nation’s unemployment and jobseekers, issued a statement yesterday (14 March) announcing that the data of people registered for the agency over the last 20 years may have been compromised.
“Following a cyber attack of which France Travail and Cap Emploi were victims, personal information concerning jobseekers currently registered with France Travail, people previously registered over the last 20 years as well as people not registered on the list of applicants employment but having a candidate space on francetravail.fr are likely to be disclosed and exploited illegally,” the agency said.
The attack reportedly occurred between 6 February and 5 March but was discovered just last week after France Travail noticed “suspicious queries” on its database. Threat actors reportedly gained access through the impersonation of Cap Emploi advisers.
Based on investigations to date, the exposed data includes first and last names, social security numbers, dates of birth, France Travail IDs, email addresses, phone numbers and postal addresses. The agency, however, did say that no passwords or banking details were affected.
The France Travail informed the Commission Nationale de l’Informatique et des Libertés (CNIL or the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty) of the incident on 8 March, which reported that the number of people whose data was potentially accessed in the attack was 43 million.
Additionally, the French agency has said that affected individuals will be sent notices informing them of the incident.
The identity of the threat actor behind the attack is currently not known, nor are the hacker’s motivations. Being such a large dataset, the threat actor could have financial motivations, either in the form of selling the stolen data or through a ransomware attack.
However, due to recent conflicts between Russia and Ukraine, and Israel and Palestine, the attack could also be politically motivated, with hackers targeting a French government agency for its support of a certain side.
France has faced a massive wave of cyber attacks over the last week or two, with the Anonymous Sudan threat group launching a number of attacks.
The group, which is considered to be one of the most prolific distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) actors in the world, launched attacks on French government agencies, announcing the attack on its Telegram.
“We have conducted a massive cyber attack on the infrastructure of the French Interministerial Directorate of Digital Affairs French,” the group wrote on Telegram.
“Their infrastructure includes more than 17,000 IPs and devices as well as over 300+ domains that have all been knocked down strongly.”
The next day, the group said the attack was still going, stunting operations as the government’s “cyber crisis team” struggled to thwart the attack.
“It’s been over 24 hours and the ‘cyber crisis team’ they deployed proved useless. The attack is still ongoing and we’re chilling while their systems burn. This is the situation in the ‘cyber crisis team,’ the threat group said.
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