Crédit Mutuel Arkéa acknowledges having suffered a cyber‑attack: 118 million euros stolen?

On Wednesday November 4, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, a bank based in Brittany, declared that it had suffered a computer attack. This allowed “fraudulent transactions to be carried out”. The establishment added that the incident is “now under control”. The bank did not confirm the amount of the embezzlement. Sources estimate it at more than 133 million dollars, or around 118 million euros.

Certain Arkéa banking services, including transfers, remain unavailable to customers. Arkéa informed the latter that this incident “has no consequences for their assets and has only led to a deferred execution of certain transfer operations”.

An alert given by a specialized researcher

“ZachXBT”, an American researcher under a pseudonym, is at the origin of the alert. His work on the security of cryptocurrencies and money laundering circuits is recognized internationally. Monday, November 2, on his Telegram channel, he announced that an unidentified “European Union entity” had lost more than 106 million dollars. The following day, it indicated that it had “identified additional withdrawals of more than $27 million.” During the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, he finally communicated to his readers the name of the French bank. He relies in particular on a diagram of the money laundering circuit to claim to have "a high degree of confidence" in the fact that the person responsible is not the Lazarus group, the name given in these circles to North Korean computer hackers.

Machine-translated from French