An attacker used the stolen passwords of staff at France’s tax administration to take tax data on hundreds of thousands of taxpayers and businesses during June and July. According to The Hacker News, the theft went undetected for about seven weeks.
The part worth noticing is how ordinary it was. France’s national cybersecurity agency, ANSSI, says in a report published this week that the attack was not sophisticated. Neither the tax administration nor ANSSI saw the data leave. There was no clever new hacking tool involved. Someone simply logged in as staff who were allowed to be there.
Why this matters to a small business
If a national government agency can miss a login-based theft for nearly two months, a business with no one watching its systems can miss it for much longer. A stolen password does not set off alarms on its own. To your email, file shares and accounting software, the attacker looks exactly like your employee.
Three practical steps
- Turn on multi-factor authentication for email, Microsoft 365 or Google Workspace, remote access and your finance systems. A password on its own should never be enough to get in.
- Look at who is logging in, and from where. Microsoft 365 and Google both record sign-ins. Someone should review them, or have alerts set up for unusual locations and times.
- Remove access that is no longer needed. Former staff, old contractors and shared accounts are easy doors to leave open.
None of these are expensive. They are the difference between finding a problem in hours and finding it seven weeks later.
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