Hacking of Viamedis and Almeris: Here’s how to know if you’re one of the millions of French people affected

Two third-party payment specialists Viamedis and Almeris were victims of the cyber attack.

About 40 million French people are potentially affected by this massive data leak.

We explain how to know if you are one of them.

Massive leak… The personal and health data of nearly 40 million French people is potentially in the hands of criminals. Two companies linked to the third-party payment sector, Viamedis and Almeris, have recently become targets of cyber attacks. A portion of their database has been siphoned off by hackers since last weekend. “Marital Status, Date of Birth, Social Security Number, Name of Health Insurer, and Guarantees Available to Third-Party Payers”That’s among the information that was fraudulently collected by the hacker(s), suggests Viamedis.

Banking data, medical data, health reimbursement details, postal details, telephone number and email address “Not affected by this settlement in any way”, ensures, for its part, the Almerys company. To find out if information about you is potentially out there, starting with your social security number, go to the resopharma.fr website. This allows you to know whether your health insurance is managed by one of these two third-party payment providers.

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  Cyberattacks against Viamedis and Almerys: What are millions of French policyholders potentially at risk?

Generally speaking, IT security experts recommend changing your password every six months as a precaution. If in doubt, the site haveibeenpwned.com (French for “Have I been fooled?”) can be very useful to find out if your email address has been the victim of a data breach. Founded by a cyber security expert, it identifies all major data leaks on the Internet. Just enter your email address to find out if it’s in the hacked database, which shows you which one is relevant to you.

If the site displays “Good news – no pwnage found”, then all is well, a priori. On the other hand, if you get an “Oh no –pwned!” appears, you need to change your password immediately. And for good reason. Sensitive data resulting from these digital heists is often resold on the dark net, a secret internet network. Using this information, scammers can launch phishing attacks. For those who don’t know, this type of scam involves sending a fraudulent email or SMS to force an Internet user to click on a link, so that it can then collect their identifiers or banking data.

“The Social Security Number is unique. You cannot change it. However, the associated password must also be unique. You must change it for security, to prevent someone from accessing your account, whether it’s with Mutual or your Amelie service.”, explains, in the TF1 report at the top of this article, Luména Duluc, cyber security expert and director of the French Information Security Club (Clusif). To avoid using the same password across multiple platforms and thus reduce the risk of hacking, cyber security experts recommend using a password manager.