Orange, France’s largest telecoms company, hit by cyberattack

Orange, one of France’s largest companies and among the biggest mobile service providers in both Europe and Africa, announced on Monday detecting a cyberattack affecting one of its internal systems.

The company — which serves a customer base of more than 290 million people, and has retail, business and enterprise clients — warned that customers were going to be affected by its response to the attack, although the nature of the incident itself was not disclosed.

“At this stage of the investigation, there is no evidence to suggest that any customer or Orange data has been extracted. We remain vigilant in this regard,” said the company’s official statement.

Its alert follows the French cybersecurity agency ANSSI warning about state-sponsored threats targeting the country’s telecommunications sector for espionage in its annual review, confirming there had been multiple compromises in recent years.

Major incidents described in the ANSSI report include a suspected state-sponsored threat actor compromising a mobile network core as well as intrusions into satellite communications infrastructure. The agency said its investigation into the incident confirmed that the attackers intended to intercept the communications of specific targets.

Although the agency did not attribute the attack to a threat cluster tracked by Western agencies, the interception of correspondence from targeted individuals was also seen and publicly avowed in Salt Typhoon breaches in the United States.

Orange said it detected the incident on Friday and that Orange Cyberdefense, its cybersecurity subsidiary, was “mobilized to isolate the potentially affected services and limit the impacts.”

The work to isolate these systems has “resulted in the disruption of certain services and management platforms for some of our corporate customers and some consumer services, primarily in France,” the company acknowledged.

“Our dedicated teams are fully mobilized to inform and support affected customers,” said the company. Its statement added that it had filed a complaint about the attack and alerted the relevant authorities, but that “for obvious security reasons” it would not be commenting further.