France’s statistics department hit by cyberattack on staff directory

This article was published on June 26, 2026 INSEE says a cyberattack exposed the data of about 12,800 staff. The census numbers are intact, but the pattern is not. The institution that counts France found itself counting victims this week. INSEE, the national statistics department, said a cyberattack had exposed personal data belonging to about 12,800 current and former staff, along with members of the civil-service corps attached to the agency. What was taken, according to INSEE, was the unglamorous kind of data: names, identity details, and professional contact information pulled from an internal staff directory. What was not taken matters more. The agency said passwords, bank details, and social-security numbers were not part of the haul, and that an investigation had found no compromise of the data INSEE collects from businesses and private individuals. For a body that holds the demographic and economic record of an entire country, that last sentence is the one doing the heavy lifting. The exposed records came from trombi.insee.fr, an internal directory that is closer to a staff photo board than a sensitive archive. A user operating under the alias “Saturne” reportedly posted t