A cyberattack on a French tax authority affected cadastral records and unclaimed estates, the Directorate General of Public Finances said Tuesday.
The cadastral breach reportedly affected about 1.8 million accounts. Authorities have not confirmed the total amount of data stolen.
Attackers gained access using stolen login details, according to the French Economy Ministry. The credentials belonged to at least two public officials and one other authorised user.
The DGFiP said it identified an access point on August 17 and shut it down. It also blocked access to the affected service portals and to the public administration intranet via remote access.
Read: X Suffers Global Outages: Musk Blames Massive Cyberattack
The breach involved cadastral files used to identify and describe property. A separate affected system handled unclaimed estates.
The Paris prosecutor’s office had already opened an investigation into another attack on the tax administration platform. That incident affected 678,000 individual and business users.
Read: China Refutes US-Led Allegations of Cyberattacks Amid International Condemnation
Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu later chaired an interministerial crisis meeting. Authorities also began notifying people whose data may have been exposed.
Lecornu asked France’s National Cybersecurity Agency, ANSSI, to audit the tax authority’s systems. The audit findings are expected in September.
