France Establishes New Government-Focused Cyber Incident Response Unit
France created REACTIV, an ANSSI-led interministerial cyber incident response unit for state services, after the DGFiP breach exposed up to 678,000 taxpayers.
ANSSI announced REACTIV (Interministerial Response & Action against Data Breaches) on September 7, a dedicated incident response capability for French state services. It lets ANSSI require ministries to take urgent protective measures for citizens' data and lead centralized technical crisis communications during attacks on state services. The move follows the DGFiP tax authority attack that exposed data of 350,000 to 678,000 taxpayers, after which the Prime Minister ordered an extensive audit of ANSSI. Two suspects aged 16 and 18 from the ZeroBytes hacking group were arrested in late August.