Leak at Chambres d'agriculture

On 21 November 2024, the Chambres d'agriculture d'Occitanie — the regional network of France's public chambers of agriculture — were reported as the victims of a large-scale cyberattack. Because the chambers' IT systems are interconnected and depend on a shared national server, the malware spread across the whole region, leaving the workstations of essentially every employee unusable.

The incident bore the hallmarks of a ransomware-type attack: infected machines had to be cleaned and rebuilt one by one, a process expected to take weeks rather than days. Around 1,000 staff across Occitanie were affected, with operations such as the processing of farmers' files disrupted and partial-unemployment measures floated as a contingency. A similar attack had struck the chambers in Normandy a few months earlier.

What was exposed or compromised:

• Internal IT systems and employee workstations across the Occitanie region (network-wide encryption/disruption)
• Potential exposure of administrative and farmer-related data held on the affected systems (not publicly quantified)

The national IT directorate (DNSI), with support from France's cybersecurity agency ANSSI, worked to restore services progressively, and a criminal complaint was filed with the authorities. No ransomware group publicly claimed the attack, and the volume of any exfiltrated data has not been confirmed. The situation was reported as brought under control, with services restored gradually.