Attackers breach France’s national bank account database

French authorities on Wednesday announced a “malicious actor” had illegally accessed a portion of the country’s National Bank Accounts File (FICOBA) recording all bank accounts in the country.

The sensitive government database holds data on more than 80 million individuals, according to the CNIL, France’s data protection authority. In an email to Recorded Future News, a spokesperson for the French government said potentially 1.2 million accounts of more than 300 millionwere impacted by the incident.

The system is operated by the Directorate General of Public Finances (DGFiP), which said the hacker impersonated a civil servant “whose credentials allowed access as part of interministerial information exchanges” to query part of the FICOBA database.

Read more at The Record