French regional bank loses $112m in cyberattack, raising alarm across financial sector

A French regional bank has fallen victim to a cyberattack, with hackers making off with a substantial sum from the institution's own accounts.

The bank, identified as Crédit Mutuel Arkéa, confirmed that hackers accessed its accounts and transferred funds out of the institution, according to Yonhap, citing AFP. Customer accounts were not affected, the bank said, but the large-scale outflow of the bank's own capital has put France's financial sector on high alert.

Local outlet Le Télégramme reported the stolen amount reached about 100 million euros ($112 million). The bank declined to disclose the precise scale of the losses, saying only that its own proprietary accounts had been compromised while customer accounts remained safe.

The attack bears a strong resemblance to a hack previously carried out against Binance, the world's largest cryptocurrency exchange.

According to French daily Le Monde, the hackers breached the computers of a third party with transaction authorization privileges and used that access to enter the bank's systems. They then reached the bank's equity accounts and siphoned off a portion of its 10 billion euros in holdings.

The stolen funds were converted into virtual assets and routed to multiple exchanges. US cryptocurrency exchange Kraken detected an unusually large transfer originating from a European bank and issued an alert Tuesday, also blocking the transactions in progress.

No group has yet been identified as responsible for the attack.

However, ZachXBT, a pseudonymous independent researcher specializing in cryptocurrency transaction tracking and money-laundering investigations, said the attack did not appear to be the work of North Korea.

The incident has prompted concern within France's financial community that it exposed deep vulnerabilities in traditional banking systems.

"This is a major warning signal for the entire French and European financial sector," a banker told Le Monde. "It shows that traditional banks are still facing considerable risk."

Meanwhile, Binance founder Zhao Changpeng said Wednesday that advances in AI technology would lead to a surge in cyberattacks targeting both cryptocurrency exchanges and banks.

"If crypto exchanges can get hacked, in my opinion banks are in an even more dangerous position," Zhao said in an interview with crypto media outlet CoinDesk, as reported by Yonhap at the time.

Zhao said the only way to defend against AI-driven hacking was for the industry to fight back with AI itself.

He added that the near term would bring "far more hacking incidents," but predicted that financial security would ultimately be strengthened as AI-based defenses improved over time.

Binance had earlier disclosed Oct. 29 that it suffered unauthorized withdrawals of $6.3 billion in virtual assets after attackers exploited a compromised engineer's laptop and gaps in its transaction approval system.