French authorities arrest 22-year-old over cyber attack on the Interior Ministry

Authorities in France have arrested and detained a 22-year-old man accused of playing a role in last week’s cyber attack on the French interior ministry’s email servers that exposed the Criminal Records Processing System and other critical ministry databases.

The Paris public prosecutor’s office announced this week that its cyber crime unit nabbed the suspected threat actor on charges of carrying out a cyber attack on the Ministry of the Interior’s systems as part of an organised group.

“The suspect, born in 2003, is already known to law enforcement, having been convicted of similar offenses in 2025. The investigation conducted by the OFAC (French Office for Combating Cybercrime) is ongoing,” the office said.

The arrest follows a significant cyber attack on the ministry’s email servers that compromised the Criminal Records Processing System (TAJ) and the Wanted Persons File (FPR) that contain sensitive law enforcement and judicial information.

According to the Ministry of the Interior, the hackers used compromised credentials to gain access to official email accounts of ministry officials and used them to access the sensitive databases.

A member of the BreachForums data leak website claimed responsibility for targeting the ministry’s website in response to law enforcement operations against senior BreachForums members, stating that they accessed the data of 16.4 million French citizens from the ministry’s databases.

Interior Minister Laurent Nunez has termed the cyber incident as "more serious than initially thought.”

“A few days ago, I said that we didn’t know whether there had been any compromises or not. Now we know that there have been compromises, but we don’t know the extent of them," he told Reuters. "I can tell you that there have not been millions of pieces of data extracted as of this morning, but I remain very cautious about the level of compromise.”