Last week, Xavier Niel’s operator was the victim of an unprecedented cyberattack. 19 million accounts, including 5 million IBANs — the vast majority French — were put up for sale on the darkweb. Friday October 25, and after denying it outright for several hours, Free finally confirmed the theft of banking data. A critical situation for the company, which nevertheless wanted to be reassuring in its crisis communication. But in the end, what are you risking with an IBAN in the wild?
Stolen IBAN: what are the risks?
Used by individuals and businesses to facilitate transactions between several bank accounts, IBANs are also used to set up automatic debits, for monthly subscriptions for example. The good news is that a IBAN only does not theoretically allow you to debit money from a bank account that does not belong to you. To achieve their goals, hackers would need to obtain a direct debit mandate signed directly by their victim.
The fact remains that fraud in this type of transaction is not rare, especially if the leak of the IBAN is combined with other personal data, such as the surnames, first names and contact details of Internet users. This is indeed the case with the cyberattack suffered by Free. The situation is therefore much more problematicsince the identity of the agent, the telephone number or other banking information such as the BIC code were also leaked.
You can file a complaint online
If you are a victim of the Free data leak, you can file a complaint online. On Wednesday October 30, the National Commission for Information Technology and Liberties (CNIL) announced the opening of an investigation, intended to shed light on the matter. The latter was entrusted to the brigade for the fight against cybercrime (BL2C) of the Paris police headquarters.
In the meantime, victims have the possibility of filing a complaint directly with the CNIL against Free, if they believe that their data has not been sufficiently protected by the company. If you are the victim of identity theft, a scam or fraudulent payments, you should, however, go to the nearest police station to report formal complaint. To speed up the processing of your request, an online form is already available on the website cybermalveillance.gouv.fr.
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