62,511 records in the SIA data leak

On 24 March 2026, France's Système d'Information sur les Armes (SIA) — the Interior Ministry's centralised firearms registry — was at the centre of a data leak after a hacker advertised records on 62,511 weapons for sale on dark-web forums. The seller posted screenshots of what appeared to be a professional armourer's SIA / Livre de Police Numérique (digital police record) account, and the figure is far below the several million firearms registered nationally.

Investigators concluded the core SIA infrastructure was not penetrated; instead, the attacker is believed to have compromised a single legitimate professional account (reportedly a gunsmith in the Vendée/Vaucluse area) and used its access to export the underlying records. The same actor was reportedly hawking data from roughly ten sports federations and other organisations.

Exposed data tied to the registered firearms included:

• Owners' full names
• Postal addresses, email addresses and phone numbers
• Weapon details (brand, model, caliber, type and classification)
• Movement/transaction history (sales, transfers, repairs, destruction)

The Interior Ministry initially did not confirm the breach. By early April 2026, Minister Laurent Nuñez acknowledged that between 20 and 30 burglaries may have been linked to the exposed data, and additional safeguards — including two-factor authentication on professional accounts — were rolled out. A suspect operating under the handle "HexDex," tied to roughly a hundred attacks on public institutions, was reported arrested in the Vendée in April 2026.