Leak at French Hunting Federation

On 23 January 2026, the Fédération Nationale des Chasseurs (FNC) — France's national hunters' federation, which runs the unified online gateway for validating hunting permits — disclosed that its members' portal had been compromised in a cyberattack detected on 20 January at around 5:30 AM.

An attacker gained unauthorized access to the member area of the permit-validation system. The FNC says it isolated the affected access quickly, which stopped the intrusion and limited its scope, then notified France's data-protection authority (CNIL) and filed a criminal complaint. The personal data of roughly 1.4 million hunters was exposed and subsequently circulated, including a large volume of contact details.

Exposed data categories included:

• First and last names, dates of birth
• Postal addresses (around 799,000 complete addresses)
• Phone numbers (around 455,000) and email addresses (around 341,000)
• Federal identification numbers and hunting-permit validation details

The FNC stated that no banking data, no firearms-ownership information and no passwords were involved. The incident was contained and systems were restored in the following days. A 21-year-old man suspected of being behind dozens of personal-data breaches in France was taken into custody in April 2026, in an investigation led by the cybercrime unit of the Paris police prefecture and the Paris prosecutor's cyber section. Members were urged to stay alert for phishing attempts.