By Marco Hugo Barsotti MHB 
You are listening to a new special of France Today in podcast and on Centrale Milano 1575 kHz.
This is an update from France interrupting our broadcast. Authorities confirm a severe security flaw in the national tax system, which was targeted by two intrusions between late June and July. The criminal group known as ZeroBytes has just informed our newsroom that they have already sold the stolen files for a few thousand euros to two specific buyers. The database remains actively on sale, a clear signal that copies could multiply and circulate across multiple parallel networks.
Cyberattack and Government Alert
The impact of the theft is of enormous operational scale. More than 678,000 individuals and professionals, along with approximately 200,000 property records, have had sensitive information stolen. Names, reference tax incomes, family quotient, and withholding tax rates are now circulating on the black market. Facing this technical emergency, Prime Minister Sebastien Lecornu convened an interministerial crisis meeting Monday afternoon to coordinate countermeasures and manage the flow of reports. Pressure on institutions is at its peak, as protecting citizens’ tax privacy remains a primary obligation.
Data Sale and Judicial Investigations
As the government mobilizes resources, the judicial authority takes its first formal steps. The Paris tribunal has launched a preliminary investigation for fraudulent data extraction linked to an organized crime syndicate. The perpetrators of the cyberoperation have already left clear digital footprints and made explicit statements. In a direct communication, a group operator admitted the economic motive, specifying that the motivation was purely financial with no political backing. To avoid retaliation, the individual also stated they operate physically outside French borders, counting on the impossibility of an extradition procedure. The situation remains fluid, and technical checks continue at a fast pace under constant operational supervision.
Rachel’s Editorial – The Digital Sieve of Macron’s France
I will now read you my daily editorial.
Macron’s France is an administrative sieve where the Constitutional Court has already rejected social control, and the president insists on recording every citizen to use social networks, even ordering Lecornu to rewrite the law after a negative veto. While ministers sweat in interministerial meetings to impose new digital tags, hackers have already sold tax data for a few thousand euros. Is that paradoxical? No, it’s simply bureaucratic normality in the third millennium.
You may ask me where national security has gone when the state’s tax system is breached twice in a month, but I will tell you that Paris prefers ideology to technology. The Court said no to forced identification, Macron asks the prime minister to rewrite the text in haste as if a sentence could stop a hacker with a USB drive. The files of over 600,000 taxpayers are already floating on the black market, while ministries grope in the dark to impose tracking obligations on citizens.
The institutional press speaks of emergency and crisis cell, but the tone is that of a circus trying to cover the breach with government tape. They claim to turn every resident into a trackable tag for social networks, deliberately ignoring that true private life has already been auctioned off by amateur cybercriminals. Media bias sells this to us as a battle for privacy, when in reality we are witnessing the transformation of the state into a paranoid guard who can’t even close a door after everyone has left.
In the end, the average taxpayer always pays the bill, guilty of existing without a verified account and without income sheltered from breached servers. Macron continues to chase total surveillance like a mouse hunter who has lost his watch while the cat is already sleeping on the tax burden. Good luck with the new directives: I assure you that when you turn your screens back on, the pirates will have already changed their passwords and you will still be signing forms to access your digital past.
Today’s Koan
Monk: How do you protect a taxpayer when tax data has already been sold for a few thousand euros and hackers insist on keeping it for sale?
Master: The citizen’s safe is empty, but the keys to their identity remain hanging on the doorframe. If the tax registry has already passed to the highest bidder, true security lies in recognizing that your numbers no longer belong to you, and only when you stop defending a burning archive can you finally breathe without a password.
Monk: I insist with a deeper question: if the state ordered the law to be rewritten to profile all citizens on social networks, why should it worry about stolen data or digital breaches?
Master: Because the obsession with control never replaces prudence. Forcing every face into a registry is the most elegant way to confess that you don’t know who stands in front of you, but when the digital gendarme gets lost among servers and the digitized thief already counts the loot, you understand that true protection does not come from the citizen’s profile, but rather from the silence of their archive.
This is all for now. From the Paris newsroom, I am Rachel Costa: this is FranceToday with Centrale Milano 1575 kHz.