French cybersecurity firm Stormshield hit by data breach

France’s Stormshield is the latest victim to cyber hackers as its technical exchanges with customer accounts were said to have been breached in December.

Having notified the French authorities about the breach, the company immediately reset all account passwords and upgraded its security across its Institute portal.

Despite its expertise in the cybersecurity space, and with a number of government agency clients, the latest incident shows an alarming escalation of data hacking attacks, even on the most vigilant companies.

The firm released a statement following the revelation of the attack, stating that it had been carried out by highly “prepared and experienced hackers”.

Although the data breach is estimated to only have affected a minority of customer accounts, France’s Agence Nationale de la Sécurité des Systèmes d’Information is working with the company to assess the breach. Comparitech’s Paul Bischoff, who spoke to Computer Weekly said it also may have been carried out by state-sponsored actors who had inspected the source code used by the company.

Speaking with Métro Liberté, David Tucker, President of Verity Systems who supply hard drive degaussing equipment to French companies said, “The threat of state sponsored attacks is real and businesses as well as government agencies have to carefully protect their systems, especially if they store sensitive information related to national security. Hard drive degaussing and destruction can mitigate a number of these risks by safely erasing data before older, legacy systems are replaced.”

With firms on the lookout for emerging threats, there is a growing collaboration with government and the private sector to put into place stronger deterring measures. With the recent attacks on US government agencies, countries around the world are looking at improving data security practices.