French government’s secure messaging system breached
An intruder has breached the French government’s encrypted messaging service, Tchap, showing once again that human error is a weak spot in any security system. Tchap 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. In 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, the French government’s interministerial digital directorate. DINUM 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. That matches at least part of a post on X (formerly Twitter) reporting the intruder’s claim to have a