French tax data stolen in cyberattack, ministry says

France's finance ministry has confirmed that data belonging to both individual and professional taxpayers was stolen in a cyberattack on the country's tax agency, the General Direction of Public Finances.

The confirmation came after a statement made on Wednesday by an anonymous attacker claiming to have hacked into the systems of the agency last month in June.

"The results of the investigation conducted by the ministry confirmed that there was a penetration of systems at that time and that information on taxpayers' personal data was accessed and exfiltrated," the statement from the ministry read.

The details provided put the recent attack in a league of its own because earlier breaches of the French government systems occurred when their employee passwords were stolen.

The ministry said that investigations are ongoing in order to find out what exact types of information were compromised and how many taxpayers have been affected by the data breach.

In a separate incident, a website called FrenchBreaches, which is used to monitor cyber attacks within the country, claimed that almost 700,000 taxpayers have had their personal information stolen.

This was based on the information received from the hackers themselves. Representatives of the ministry have not responded to a query on this yet.

The ministry said individuals whose data may have been compromised will receive direct notification specifying what information was consulted or extracted, along with any recommended precautionary steps.

No timeline was given for when those individual notices would go out.