A file containing the medical data of nearly 500,000 French people is currently circulating on the Internet.

These data would come from around thirty medical biology laboratories, located mainly in the north-western quarter of France.

A file containing sensitive medical data for a list of nearly 500,000 people in France is circulating on the internet, AFP noted on Tuesday, following information from

Liberation

and the blog specializing in cybersecurity Zataz.

The file contains 491,840 names associated with contact details (postal address, telephone, email) and a social security number.

They are sometimes accompanied by indications on the blood group, the attending physician or the mutual, or comments on the state of health (including a possible pregnancy), drug treatments, or pathologies (in particular HIV).

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Data from around thirty laboratories 

According to the

Checknews

verification

section

of the daily

Liberation

, which investigated the subject, the data would come from around thirty medical biology laboratories, located mainly in the north-western quarter of France.

According to the newspaper, they correspond to samples taken between 2015 and October 2020, a period which coincides for the laboratories questioned with the use of the same software for entering medico-administrative information published by the Dedalus group.

"We have no certainty as to the fact that it is only Dedalus France software which is at issue in this affair", reacted the deputy managing director Didier Neyrat.

"We have set up a crisis unit because we take this seriously and we will work in partnership with our clients to understand what happened," he added.

"We can find this file in 7 different places on the Internet," said Damien Bancal, journalist specializing in cybersecurity, who first identified the leak on February 14 on his Zataz blog.

A list for sale on Telegram

According to him, this file was the subject of a commercial negotiation between several hackers on a Telegram group specializing in the exchange of stolen databases and one of them circulated it on the web following an argument. .

"500,000 data is already huge and there is nothing to prevent hackers from having a lot more," he said.

Asked Tuesday evening by AFP, the National Information Systems Agency (Anssi), the personal data gendarme (Cnil) and the Directorate General of Health (DGS) were not able to comment.

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Multiple attacks on healthcare establishments

Computer attacks are currently increasing against healthcare establishments in France.

Computer hackers paralyzed the hospitals of Dax and Villefranche-sur-Saône on February 8 and 15.

On February 19, the Agence du numérique en santé also indicated on its site that a list of 50,000 login credentials for hospital center agents was on sale on a cybercriminal forum.

"There have been 27 cyber attacks on hospitals in 2020 and since the start of 2021, it's been one attack per week", noted last week the Secretary of State in charge of digital, Cédric O.

This upsurge has led the government to deploy new budgets to strengthen the security of these establishments.