{"slug": "french-governments-secure-messaging-system-breached", "title": "French government’s secure messaging system breached", "summary": "An intruder breached the French government's encrypted messaging service, Tchap, by taking over a user's account through social engineering, the government's interministerial digital directorate (DINUM) reported. The attacker accessed unencrypted public chat rooms, potentially exposing data from 73,467 of the system's 825,000 users, including 643,459 messages and 59,386 media files. DINUM has blocked the affected account and is investigating the extent of the breach, which did not compromise the system's encryption.", "body_md": "An intruder has breached the French government’s encrypted messaging service, Tchap, showing once again that [human error is a weak spot](https://www.csoonline.com/article/4182881/security-shifts-to-the-human-layer-as-ai-scams-surge.html) in any security system.\n\nTchap was developed in France as an example of national sovereignty and was designed to be a more secure option than WhatsApp for communication between government employees.\n\nIn this case, it wasn’t the technology that was at fault, but a user: The intruder gained access to the system by taking over their account, according to [DINUM](https://www.numerique.gouv.fr/sinformer/espace-presse/incident-tchap/), the French government’s interministerial digital directorate.\n\nDINUM said it has blocked the affected user’s access and is investigating how much information has been revealed. While the system’s encryption was not broken, the intruder would have been able to view unencrypted public chat rooms accessible to the account taken over, potentially affecting 73,467 of the system’s 825,000 users, DINUM said.\n\nThat matches at least part of a post on X (formerly Twitter) reporting the intruder’s claim to have accessed the account of a Tchap user in the education sector through [social engineering](https://www.csoonline.com/article/555391/social-engineering-101-18-ways-to-hack-a-human-infographic.html), exposing 73,467 user accounts, 643,459 messages, 876 chat rooms with message history, and 59,386 media files totalling 13.51 GB, including references to documents marked “Diffusion Restreinte” (restricted distribution).\n\nDINUM said that it had reminded all Tchap users that public chat rooms are accessible to any user and are not encrypted, so all participants should refrain from any sensitive or confidential information.\n\n*This article first appeared on CSO.*", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/french-governments-secure-messaging-system-breached", "canonical_source": "https://www.computerworld.com/article/4184590/french-governments-secure-messaging-system-breached-2.html", "published_at": "2026-06-12 15:51:34+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-06-12 16:13:13.101592+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["ai-safety", "ai-policy"], "entities": ["Tchap", "DINUM", "French government", "WhatsApp"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/french-governments-secure-messaging-system-breached", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/french-governments-secure-messaging-system-breached.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/french-governments-secure-messaging-system-breached.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/french-governments-secure-messaging-system-breached.jsonld"}}