French telecom giant Orange discloses cyberattack

Orange, a French telecommunications company and one of the world’s largest telecom operators, revealed that it detected a breached system on its network on Friday.

The compromised system was discovered and isolated from the rest of the network by Orange Cyberdefense, the company’s cybersecurity business unit, on July 25. This has led to some operational disruptions, primarily affecting French customers, which are expected to be gradually resolved by Wednesday morning, July 30.

“On Friday, July 25, the Orange Group detected a cyberattack on one of its information systems. Immediately alerted, with the support of Orange Cyberdefense, the teams mobilized fully to isolate the potentially affected services and limit the impact,” the telecom giant said.

“However, these isolation operations resulted in the disruption of certain services and management platforms for some of our business customers and for a few consumer services, mainly in France.”

Since detecting this cyberattack, the company has alerted the relevant authorities and filed a complaint. Also, its investigation team has yet to find evidence that any data was stolen during the breach.

“At this stage of the investigation, there is no evidence to suggest that any customer or Orange data has been extracted. We remain vigilant in this regard,” the company added.

While Orange has not attributed the cyberattack to a specific hacking group or threat actor, the incident bears resemblance to a series of widespread breaches of telecom providers in the United States and worldwide that have been linked to China’s Salt Typhoon cyber-espionage group.

The FBI and CISA confirmed in October that the Chinese Salt Typhoon state hackers had breached multiple telecom providers (including AT&T, Verizon, Lumen, Charter Communications, Consolidated Communications, and Windstream), as well as other telecom companies in dozens of other countries.

Last month, Comcast and Digital Realty were also tagged as potentially compromised by Salt Typhoon, with satellite communications company Viasat revealing weeks later that it had also been breached as part of the same attacks.

In February, Orange’s Romanian branch was hit by another cyberattack, with the company confirming the breach of a non-critical application after a threat actor using the alias ‘Rey’ claimed to have stolen thousands of internal documents containing employee data, user records, source code, invoices, contracts, and 380,000 email addresses.

Orange provides consumer communication services and business services to 294 million customers across Europe, Africa, and the Middle East, including 256 million mobile and 22 million fixed broadband customers. Orange also provides IT and telecommunications services to multinational companies under the brand Orange Business, has 125,800 employees worldwide, and reported revenues of €40.3 billion in 2024.