AQUAES: contact details of environmental consulting firms exposed

On 30 April 2026, AQUAES — a directory of French environmental consulting and engineering firms working in water, sanitation and technical engineering services — became the subject of a leaked database circulating online. The data set compiles professional contact records for environmental-sector businesses across France.

The origin of the database and the circumstances of its distribution remain unconfirmed; as of the initial reporting, no official statement had established whether it stemmed from a compromise, a misconfiguration, or unauthorized scraping of the directory. The attack vector is therefore undetermined.

The exposed records reportedly include:

• Names of the consulting firms
• Names of the responsible managers
• Full postal addresses
• Phone numbers
• Email addresses
• Websites
• GPS coordinates

Because the data is professional rather than strictly personal, the primary risk is targeted abuse: tailored phishing, professional spam, fraudulent solicitation, identity spoofing of the listed firms, and geographic targeting. The total number of affected records was not specified, and no official remediation or regulatory response had been reported at the time of disclosure, leaving the status unknown.