Why Is France Among the Top 5 Most Cyberattacked Countries?
In late May 2026, France's Ministry of the Economy acknowledged that a malicious actor had been able to access the national bank-account registry, exposing data on roughly 1.2 million accounts. A few weeks earlier, the Ministry of the Interior, the Ministry of Sports, and the French immigration office had been hit by separate attacks. These incidents are not isolated accidents: they fit a heavy trend that places France, depending on the ranking, among the three to five most-targeted countries in the world.
How can this position be explained? And what does the often-quoted "top 5" actually cover? A breakdown.
"Top 5," "top 3," "2nd in Europe": what do the rankings really say?
A necessary clarification first: France's exact rank varies with the methodology used, and that is normal. Comparing these rankings without understanding them leads to fragile claims. Three readings coexist across 2025-2026.
| Source | Scope | France's rank | Key figures |
|---|---|---|---|
| Inetum, Threat Landscape 2025 | Global (incident volume) | Top 3 | 154,601 alerts · 29,886 incidents |
| Check Point, France 2025 | Europe | 2nd | ~13% of European attacks |
| Radware, Geopolitical threats | Global (hacktivism) | 5th | ~840 claimed attacks |
In its Threat Landscape 2025, the IT services firm Inetum places France in the global top 3 of most-attacked countries, alongside the United States and the United Kingdom. The finding rests on the actual activity of its monitoring center, which analyzed more than 154,000 security alerts and confirmed nearly 29,900 verified incidents over the year.
Radware's annual report on geopolitical threats takes a different angle. Focusing on hacktivism and politically motivated attacks, it ranks France 5th worldwide with roughly 840 claimed attacks, behind Israel, the United States, Ukraine, and Germany. Here, it is the conflict dimension that shapes the leaderboard.
Finally, Check Point's report adopts a European lens: France is the 2nd most-targeted country on the continent in 2025, concentrating about 13% of attacks recorded in Europe, just behind the United Kingdom and ahead of Germany.
These three ranks do not contradict one another: they measure different things: overall incident volume, geopolitical attacks, regional share. What they share is what matters: whatever the lens, France never leaves the leading pack.
Official figures confirm the trend
Beyond private vendors, French public sources trace the same upward trajectory.
The statistical service of the Ministry of the Interior recorded more than 17,500 cyberattacks in France in 2025, a 4% increase over 2024. On the data-regulator side, the CNIL received 5,629 personal-data breach notifications in 2024, up 20% year over year, with a doubling of breaches affecting more than one million people. ANSSI, for its part, handled 4,386 security events in 2024, 15% more than in 2023.
The threat is therefore growing not only in frequency but also in scale: mass incidents, affecting millions of people, are multiplying. Ransomware remains the weapon of choice: Inetum recorded more than 8,000 cases over 2025, up 23% in a year.
Why France, specifically?
Four structural factors, regularly highlighted by analysts, explain this overexposure.
Economic weight. France is one of the world's leading economies, with a high density of high-value companies, large international groups, and critical infrastructure. The more value a target concentrates, the more it attracts financially motivated attackers, chief among them ransomware operators.
Rapid digital transformation. The accelerated digitization of the economy and public services mechanically widens the attack surface. Every new online service, every interconnection, every mobile app is another door. This dynamic particularly affects SMEs and mid-sized firms, often less equipped than large groups to keep pace with security.
Geopolitical exposure. This is arguably the most decisive factor in recent years. France's role within the European Union, its support for Ukraine, and its diplomatic weight make it a prime target for state-aligned hacktivism. Pro-Russian groups such as Noname057(16) have run repeated denial-of-service and defacement campaigns against French institutions and companies. As Radware sums up, this concentration of attacks on a few nations illustrates the use of hacktivism as a proxy weapon in contemporary conflicts, aimed at disrupting adversaries' digital infrastructure.
Coveted national champions. Beyond immediate financial value, the French economy concentrates industrial, technological and defense champions, flagship firms that draw as much admiration as covetousness. Some operations do not seek a quick payout but a lasting advantage: cyberespionage aimed at stealing patents, know-how and manufacturing secrets for the benefit of foreign competitors, or destabilization manoeuvres meant to weaken a company to ease its acquisition at a discount, a scenario already seen. In these often patient and discreet campaigns, the stolen data is worth less as loot than as strategic leverage.
A telling detail noted by Check Point: the distribution of attacks across the year is highly uneven. Nearly a quarter of 2025's incidents were recorded in December alone, a period ripe for phishing campaigns and fraud tied to end-of-year shopping.
What our monitoring observes day to day
Our monitoring system continuously consolidates French-language cyber signals, which allows the French threat to be observed at a fine grain. Over a recent window, the signals specifically tied to France perfectly illustrate the diversity of targets: no organization is too small or too peripheral to be hit.
The examples gathered over this period bear it out: a data leak at McDonald's France affecting its loyalty program, the Gîtes de France platform hit among several booking sites, a wave of incidents striking the French tourism sector, and an alert on the growing vulnerability of SMEs and mid-sized firms to ransomware. The same window also shows roughly a 10% rise in data leaks in France for 2025.
This picture confirms a notable shift: cybercrime no longer targets only large groups and central administrations. It is moving down toward the mid-tier economic fabric, the one that holds monetizable data but mounts more modest defenses. That is precisely the link attackers, now equipped to automate their campaigns, exploit at scale.
A lasting position, not an anomaly
France's place in the top 5 of most-cyberattacked countries is neither a statistical artifact nor a bad vintage. It stems from structural characteristics (economic wealth, digital maturity, geopolitical exposure) that are not going away. Rankings will keep shifting by a rank or two depending on methodology, but the underlying trend is stable.
For French organizations, the lesson is clear: the question is no longer whether you will be targeted, but when, and with what level of preparation. In a context where both the volume and the speed of attacks are rising, continuous monitoring and anticipation cease to be a luxury and become an operational necessity.
Sources
- Inetum, Threat Landscape 2025 (France in the global top 3; 154,601 alerts, 29,886 incidents; +23% ransomware): inetum.com
- Radware, Annual report on geopolitical threats 2025 (France 5th worldwide, ~840 attacks): radware.com, relayed by La Nouvelle Tribune
- Check Point, France threat landscape 2025 (2nd most-targeted European country, 13% of attacks), via Blog du Modérateur
- Statistical service of the Ministry of the Interior (SSMSI): more than 17,500 cyberattacks in 2025 (+4%), via franceinfo
- CNIL: 5,629 data-breach notifications in 2024 (+20%): cnil.fr
- ANSSI: 4,386 security events handled in 2024 (+15%): cyber.gouv.fr
- Primary data: LuksMentis monitoring (consolidated cyber feed, May-June 2026)