More than 100 million euros gone: Crédit Mutuel Arkéa admits having been the victim of a giant hack

The bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa declared that it had been the target of a “cyberattack” with losses of around more than 100 million euros, Wednesday evening in a press release. The attackers “used Crédit Mutuel Arkéa’s own account to carry out transactions with other banking players”, they then “converted this money into cryptocurrency via specialized platforms”. They "did not go through customer accounts of its federations or its subsidiaries", insists the bank.

The bank's lack of responsiveness called into question This Wednesday's attack was revealed in the morning by ZachXBT, an investigator specializing in blockchain, who claimed that Crédit Mutuel Arkéa had been the victim of a hack involving more than 133 million dollars (around 115 million euros). According to its investigations, the hackers transferred the stolen funds to cryptocurrency exchange platforms to convert them in particular into stablecoins, cryptocurrencies backed by the dollar. The investigator specified that the attack took place over several days and that the damage could be even greater.

ZachXBT had also questioned the bank's lack of responsiveness, estimating that the lack of rapid reporting had allowed the hackers to launder more than 30 million dollars which could, according to him, have been frozen by European authorities. Questioned during the day, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa admitted having suffered “fraudulent operations”, without confirming the amount put forward by the investigator. The bank assured that it had immediately suspended certain transactions to prevent further fraudulent movements, while specifying that its customers' accounts had not been affected.

Machine-translated from French