Newshot Title: French bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa hit by cyberattack, hackers transfer away €100 million
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French bank Crédit Mutuel Arkéa hit by cyberattack, hackers transfer away €100 million
IT Home, November 15 news: French banking and insurance group Crédit Mutuel Arkéa has reported a major cyberattack on the company. The attackers used the compromised system of a third-party service provider as a breakthrough point, and then, through forged instant transfer instructions, transferred approximately €100 million (IT Home note: about 738 million yuan at current exchange rates) out of the bank's own accounts.
The group's chairman, Julien Carmona, said the attack "very likely" used advanced artificial intelligence technology, but has not provided any conclusive evidence so far. The bank is currently working with relevant financial institutions to recover the funds, and French police have also launched a criminal investigation.
Carmona pointed out that the loss accounts for about 1% of the group's equity, equivalent to one quarter's profit for the group, and therefore will not have a material impact on the bank's overall operations and financial stability.
According to disclosures, the attack can be traced back to October 27. At that time, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa discovered that a third-party service provider's system had been compromised, immediately cut off system connections between the two parties, and reported to the relevant authorities. However, by then the hackers had already obtained access to the bank's systems.
After successfully entering the bank's systems, the attackers forged the IBANs (International Bank Account Numbers) of multiple Fortuneo bank accounts and used these fake accounts to initiate transfer instructions, moving funds from Crédit Mutuel Arkéa's own accounts to external accounts.
Specifically, the relevant transfer activity began on Sunday, November 1. The attackers used various methods to bypass the bank's risk control mechanisms and tried to make the illegal transfers look like normal transactions. The transferred funds first entered real accounts at other legitimate European banks, all of which had been opened in advance by the attackers. Carmona believes this shows that the entire attack operation had been prepared over a relatively long period. The attackers then moved the funds to cryptocurrency trading platforms, attempting to use crypto asset trading to conceal the flow of funds.
On the morning of Tuesday, November 3, after the bank discovered the actual scale of the fraud, it immediately cut off all external access to its information systems and disconnected from the interbank payment system to prevent further fund losses. The bank then deleted the fake accounts, reset all authentication credentials, and officially announced the incident to the public the next day.
Carmona specifically emphasized that Fortuneo's systems and customers were not affected by the attack. At the same time, he acknowledged that some professionals in the crypto asset sector had already noticed abnormal fund flows to cryptocurrency trading platforms on November 1 and 2, but at the time no one linked these transactions to Crédit Mutuel Arkéa.
However, blockchain investigator ZachXBT had already discovered the abnormal fund flows before the bank publicly disclosed the incident. According to a CoinDesk report, ZachXBT discovered more than $106 million (about 709 million yuan at current exchange rates) in suspicious cryptocurrency withdrawals on November 2, then raised the estimated amount to more than $133 million (about 890 million yuan at current exchange rates), and on November 4 pointed out that Crédit Mutuel Arkéa might be the victim institution.
Blockchain analytics firm Bitquery tracked and found that within 21 hours from November 1 to 2, accounts associated with platforms including Kraken, Crypto.com, and OKX transferred out a total of about $108.8 million (about 728 million yuan at current exchange rates) worth of USDC stablecoins, a considerable portion of which was subsequently converted into Ethereum. Because Ethereum has no centralized issuing institution capable of freezing assets across the entire network, once the funds are converted, recovery may become even more difficult.
At present, Crédit Mutuel Arkéa has not announced the final loss amount, because the bank is still working to recover some of the funds. Carmona said the bank and cryptocurrency trading platforms have successfully intercepted or frozen some transfers, some funds have also been recovered, and efforts to recover the remaining funds are still underway.
Regarding the attackers' identities and technical methods, Carmona described them as "a well-organized, well-equipped criminal group with outstanding technical capabilities," and believes the attack "very likely used advanced artificial intelligence technology." However, no organization has claimed responsibility for the incident, and Carmona did not further explain exactly which parts of the attack artificial intelligence was involved in.
Therefore, although the bank lists artificial intelligence as one of the technologies possibly involved in the attack, there is still a lack of specific evidence to prove this claim. Carmona also believes that Crédit Mutuel Arkéa may be the first bank in France or even Europe to successfully suffer this type of attack, but this statement also remains to be further confirmed.
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