alt Hacker NewsFrance's tax agency got hacked (in French)
Comments
After 3-4 decades of networked compute, is it now fair to say that 'there are two types of organizations in the world: those that have been hacked, and those that know that they have been hacked.'
I wrote this article and I found the comments funny. I have an updated version in English here : https://www.linkedin.com/posts/tariqkrim_french-tax-authorit...
"got hacked (in French)".
Got hacqued.
"Ce scénario n'est pas théorique, il a déjà eu lieu. En octobre 2025, la Fédération française de tir se fait voler les données de près d'un million de licenciés et d'anciens licenciés : état civil, adresse postale, téléphone, numéro de licence.
Les mois suivants, des individus se présentent au domicile de licenciés en se faisant passer pour des policiers ou des gendarmes, parfois en tenue, pour se faire remettre des armes. Des vols sont constatés à Nice, à Paris, à Limoges, à Décines."
Sounds like a far fetched movie!
Website dedicated to public and private data breaches in France : frenchbreaches.com/
For government services, they are getting more and more common, it's scary.
Meanwhile in Norway much of this wouldn't matter because the accessed information would have been public anyway. The non-tax PII is still a loss of course.
I've lived for 10 years in France and virtually all spam I receive is from French leaks (I know due to dedicated addresses), which have kept happening since I left. Bourse des Vols, Free, even Doctolib and my hospital (!), and now this. I simply can't trust French companies, it's an awful anecdotal experience.
I believe that we established all those government systems are fairly easy to hack. I remember some French military naval construction network got owned about a year ago, much worst in a sense.
My guess is since a global conflict is ramping up this is only the beginning and we are about to see some real damage.
It is fairly easy to create chaos in a country for a few weeks if you start disrupting the grid, payments or internet access.
A couple of days ago I received a strange letter from the France tax agency. For context: I received it in my home in Italy, and it was addressed to someone else (perhaps a previous tenant of the house?). It seemed legit but completely misdirected. Or perhaps it was generated from the data in this hack.
I want to believe this will reveal people who do tax fraud or potentially illegal tax dodging schemes
It's probably the quickest way to punish those people, just regular data leaks from the tax bureau.
I'm probably too optimistic, since this data is probably not admissible in court.
i think we are on the verge of some serious event that will affect the whole ai industry.
Previously (in english): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49298303
They couldn't even wipe out everybody's tax bill.
Weak.
I mean, which official service has not been hacked now ?
Posted this because it's a solid post-mortem on the recent French tax agency breach, going beyond the headlines into the detection gap, the legal angle, and the broader systemic issues. Quick summary of the key points below (original is in French):
* French tax authority (DGFiP) breach › ~678,000 records leaked, names, tax bracket, reference income, withholding rate
* Detection gap › intrusion spotted and cut off in late June, but the actual data theft wasn't discovered until the stolen data went up for sale on Aug 12, over a month later
* Second breach, same attacker › land registry (cadastre) systems, late July, claimed 2M+ people affected, alleged MFA bypass
* Third incident › French Ministry of Education systems also compromised in late July (staff data since 2001), disclosed quietly with little press coverage
* Legal precedent cited › a 2023 EU Court of Justice ruling (stemming from Bulgaria's 2019 tax agency breach) established that fear of misuse alone counts as damage, and shifts the burden of proof onto the agency to show its security was adequate
* Root cause argument › legacy "trust everything once you're inside" architecture, opposite of zero-trust, extended via remote/VPN access since COVID without redesigning the underlying trust model
* Systemic issue › France's NIS2 transposition law has been stalled in parliament since 2024, partly over a dispute involving encryption backdoor provisions
* Broader angle › piece also covers AI's growing role on the offensive side of cybersecurity, and the US scaling back international cyber-cooperation efforts through 2025–2026
[flagged]
The post is verbose, but lacks substance:
- The last two sections (≈20% of the article, 5.Cloud and 6.IA) are barely relevant.
- Some comparisons are questionable. It claims that, since some taxes data was compromised, the trust in the national Federated Identity is eroded "as if Facebook Connect was hacked". That's strange, I think it should be "as the trust in Facebook Connect would be eroded when Facebook is hacked". Anyway, I think most people won't care.
- Some sentences make no sense: "Le piratage de Ficoba semble en être l'exemple type"... But "Ficoba" is not mentioned anywhere, and, though I know what the word means, I can't guess what the sentence points to.
The OP should have mentioned another important hack of French national structures that happened in december 2025 and which is well documented. IIRC, through phishing, a keylogger was installed on a teacher's computer. Then the hackers got credentials to an internal training platform for teachers. Then they exploited multiple security breaches and connections between Ministries to get access to the national police files.