France's Tax Authority Data Breach Affects 678,000 People

France's Ministry for the Economy and Finance has acknowledged a data breach after an attacker penetrated the systems of the Directorate General of Public Finances (DGFiP) and stole information on 678,000 individuals and organizations.

The incident came to light on August 12, 2026, when a member of the PwnForums hacking forum going by the handle “ZeroBytes” claimed responsibility for the attack and put the stolen database up for sale. The investigation carried out since then has shown that, before access was cut off, the attacker managed to view and exfiltrate data: information on the reference tax income, the family quotient and the withholding-tax rate, and, for companies, the name and SIREN number. Land-registry data was also affected — the addresses and floor areas of properties.

That said, the agency stresses that the online accounts of citizens and organizations were not compromised, and logins and passwords were not affected. On discovering the attack, the tax administration shut down access to the sensitive information systems and notified the CNIL, the personal-data protection regulator. The investigation is ongoing, with the involvement of the national cybersecurity agency ANSSI.

It could have been bigger

The attacker claims that, through the platform for accessing the central land registry (SPDC), he gained access to data on roughly 20 million French citizens, but was only able to exfiltrate 252,149 records covering more than 2 million people. He says he could not complete the exfiltration in full — the process proved too labor-intensive and would have taken months. With characteristic irony, he added that he still retains access to the panel and is ready to sell it, along with the database, for a low price, while griping in passing that France, as usual, is not disclosing the incident.

The ministry has promised that starting next week it will contact all those affected by email or letter, explaining exactly what data may have been involved and what precautions they should take.

A string of breaches at French agencies

This case is far from the first in a series of attacks on France's government bodies. In January, the regulator fined the France Travail employment agency 5 million euros after the theft of data on 43 million people. A month later, the Finance Ministry reported a breach of the FICOBA bank-account registry, affecting more than 1.2 million records. And later still, the France Titres agency admitted the compromise of a database of 19 million records, presumably stolen from the national secure-documents agency ANTS.

Source: Bleeping Computer