France to allocate €200 million to strengthen cybersecurity

French Prime Minister Sébastien Lecornu has announced that next week the government will allocate €200 million to modernise and strengthen the protection of state digital services, Le Monde reports.

The decision comes in the wake of a large-scale cyberattack on the system of the National Secure Documents Agency (ANTS), which occurred on April 15. As a result, users’ data—including names, addresses, dates of birth, email addresses, and phone numbers—was stolen.

According to the prime minister, the scale of the leak and the fact that the targeted agency is responsible for citizens’ personal documents have caused serious concern.

“The situation is serious, even if it does not involve classified data. Since the beginning of the year, we have been recording around three data breaches per day,” Lecornu said.

On April 15, the ANTS portal was hacked, resulting in the leakage of personal data from approximately 11.7 million accounts.

By Vugar Khalilov