French Football Federation reports cyberattack with data theft

French Football Federation hit by cybercrime: In a cyberattack, attackers stole data from the administrative software used for members, among other things. The federation admitted this over the weekend.

In a statement, the French Football Federation (FFF) malicious actors were able to compromise an account and gain unauthorized access to the service. After the federation noticed these accesses, it deactivated the affected account and initiated a password reset for all users.

The Football Federation has informed the responsible authorities ANSSI (Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information, roughly the French equivalent of BSI) and CNIL (Commission Nationale de l'Informatique et des Libertés, the French data protection authority) and has also filed a criminal complaint. The FFF intends to inform all affected individuals whose email address is contained in the copied database about the IT incident.

Data theft at the French Football Federation

The attackers were able to access full names, gender, date, and place of birth, nationality, address, email address, phone number, and driver's license numbers. The FFF does not disclose how many members or individuals are impacted.

However, FFF members should exercise extreme "vigilance towards all suspicious or unusual communications" that may arrive via SMS, call, email, or similar and appear to originate from the FFF, the associated club, or other senders connected to them. This applies particularly when they request to open file attachments, provide account details, or transmit passwords or bank information.

The federation also assures: "The FFF is committed to protecting all data entrusted to it and constantly strengthens and adapts its security measures to counter – like many other players – the increasing number and new forms of cyberattacks."

At the end of last week, it became known that the OpenAI service provider Mixpanel victim of a cyberattack was. Here too, data apparently fell into the wrong hands -- specifically from users of OpenAI services via an API.

(dmk)