A 22-year old man has been arrested after an earlier cyberattacks on the French interior ministry's email servers, which affected more than 20 files including those with criminal records.
The French prosecutor's department said on Wednesday that the person arrested was already on police records after having been convicted of similar crimes this year. It said the suspect was born in 2003 but the prosecutor did not name the individual.
Interior Minister Laurent Nunez had said earlier on Wednesday that last week's attack was more serious than initially thought.
"It's serious," he told Franceinfo radio on Wednesday.
"A few days ago, I said that we didn't know whether there had been any compromises or not. Now we know that there have been compromises, but we don't know the extent of them."
The compromised files included criminal records.
Nunez said a judicial probe and an administrative investigation were underway, and that the National Commission for Information Technology and Civil Liberties (CNIL) had been notified.
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"I can tell you that there have not been millions of pieces of data extracted as of this morning (...), but I remain very cautious about the level of compromise," he added.
(FRANCE 24 with Reuters)
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