French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has convened an interministerial crisis unit on Monday following a widespread cyberattack targeting the nation's tax administration.
Matignon, the official office of the French Prime Minister in Paris, announced on Sunday that Lecornu will chair the emergency meeting via secure videoconference. The session is scheduled to take place immediately following the conclusion of his official trip to Gironde, a department in southwestern France.
The gathering will assemble senior leaders from all government ministries affected by the security breach. Participants will work to coordinate administrative responses after private tax records belonging to hundreds of thousands of citizens and commercial entities were accessed without authorization in an incident revealed earlier this week.
Matignon confirmed that a formal legal complaint has already been filed regarding the attack and that a judicial investigation is currently underway. Officials have also submitted a formal notification to CNIL, the National Commission on Informatics and Liberty, which operates as France's independent data privacy regulatory authority.
Data breach notifications
A primary focus of the crisis meeting will be preparing individual alerts for the 678,000 individuals and companies identified as victims of unauthorized data access. Direct notifications to affected tax account holders are set to commence on Monday, August 17.
According to Matignon, each impacted user will receive an individual message outlining the precise categories of personal or corporate data that may have been exposed during the intrusion. The correspondence will also outline specific vigilance measures and defensive steps users should adopt to protect their financial accounts.
The crisis session enables the Prime Minister to work alongside all relevant ministerial departments to verify that the notification procedure is completely ready before alerts are released. The response comes amid growing political scrutiny in Paris, where the Socialist group in the Senate, the upper house of the French Parliament, has formally called for a parliamentary commission of inquiry into the incident.
Administration security plan
Monday's meeting will also serve as a progress review for a broader plan to secure state administrations, which was first launched on April 30. That security framework is structured around establishing a new digital governance model across the French state and strengthening technical resources and capabilities within public agencies.
The secure video meeting model selected by Lecornu reflects the same interministerial coordination structure he utilized throughout the summer months to oversee emergency management for severe heatwaves and forest fires across France.
