Orange Confirms Cyberattack Disrupting French Customers

[Orange Cyberattack]

In this blog series we spotlight one of the stories from our cybersecurity newsletter, Beacon.

French telecommunications giant Orange has confirmed a cyberattack on one of its information systems, prompting temporary service disruptions.

The breach, detected on Friday July 25th, was identified by Orange Cyberdefense, the company's dedicated cybersecurity department.

The incident primarily impacted operational systems serving business clients and certain consumer services in France.

"Immediately alerted, with the support of Orange Cyberdefense, the teams mobilized fully to isolate the potentially affected services and limit the impact," Orange said in a statement.

Following the discovery, Orange promptly notified relevant authorities and filed a formal complaint. The company's investigation has so far found no evidence of data theft.

"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."

While Orange has not attributed the attack to a known threat group, the nature of the incident mirrors recent large-scale attacks against telecom providers linked to China's Salt Typhoon.

Salt Typhoon are known for targeting communications infrastructures and have been tied to breaches including AT&T, Verizon, Lumen, and Charter Communications. Most recently, Comcast, Digital Realty, and Viasat disclosed compromises believed to be part of the same campaign.

In February this year, Orange's Romanian branch also confirmed a breach of a non-critical application after a hacker using the alias "Rey" claimed to have stolen thousands of internal documents, employee data, and hundreds of thousands of email addresses.