New data leak at the French recreational hunters' association FNC

On Saturday, 31 October 2026, a hacker using the pseudonym «ChimeraZ» offered for sale, on a forum for stolen data, a database that he attributes to the chasseurdefrance.com portal of the Fédération nationale des chasseurs (FNC). According to his listing, it comprises 5,700 records on 4,978 people, plus a separate list of 49 administrator accounts. The FNC is the umbrella organisation of French recreational hunters. It has not so far confirmed the incident.

What the database on offer contains

The specialist portal Cyberattaque.org analysed a free sample of 199 accounts. It contains names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of birth, postcodes in almost every case, full postal addresses in eight cases, and passwords as bcrypt hashes, meaning not in plain text. Five accounts in the sample have administrator rights, two of them at the highest level. The accounts were created between July and September 2021, and most belong to the departments of Vendée and Seine-Maritime.

The platform Fuites Infos concludes that the data more likely originates from a form application used by departmental recreational hunters' associations than from the national portal. Whether this is a new break-in or older data that has resurfaced remains unclear.

The major case from January

The new discovery is part of a series. At 5.30 a.m. on 20 January 2026, unknown persons gained access to the members' area of the "Guichet unique", through which French recreational hunters have their hunting licence validated each year. The FNC confirmed unauthorised access to personal data and validation details, but described it as a limited incident. The very next day, a data set of around 27 gigabytes was offered on the dark web for roughly 1,200 euros, as Ostraca documented. A written question to the Interior Minister speaks of around 1.4 million people affected.

At the beginning of April, the data set covering around one million people and 455,103 telephone numbers was offered again in processed form (France Chasse). At the end of January, the Office français de la biodiversité (OFB) also confirmed an attack on its application for managing hunting licences. The registration portal for the hunting examination was still offline in mid-March, almost two months later (Mediaterranée).

Gun owners as targets

In January, the FNC stressed that information on gun ownership was not affected. That is of little reassurance: anyone holding a valid hunting licence is very likely to own firearms, and the address is in the data set. After the attack on the Fédération française de tir in autumn 2025, there were targeted burglaries and thefts of weapons, in some cases following visits by fake police officers. The Paris public prosecutor confirmed the connection (Mediaterranée).

In March 2026, data from the state firearms information system SIA was also siphoned off via the compromised account of a gun dealer. The perpetrator boasted of holding details of more than 62,000 weapons together with the owners' addresses. The Interior Ministry confirmed the leak, but stresses that the SIA itself was not breached (Next). Since 1 April 2026, dealers have had to log in there using a second factor (Journal du Geek). In September, a member of parliament asked the Interior Minister about violent thefts of weapons from legal owners since this leak.

A whole wave followed in October. According to Cyberattaque.org, the same hacker, "ChimeraZ", offered customer data from several gun dealers, including 35,303 customers of the Armurerie Gilles and 3,789 gun owners of the Armurerie Laudier, plus a database from the Fédération française de tir allegedly containing 586,854 people. On 22 October, the FFTir confirmed a new attack on the data of its licence holders (Acaraibes). Back in September the same hacker had offered data on 120,158 customers of the online retailer Armurerie Lavaux (Mediaterranée).

On 20 April, police in the Vendée arrested a 21-year-old who is alleged to be behind dozens of leaks under the pseudonym “HexDex”. The Paris public prosecutor attributes the SIA leak to him, among others; a link to the FNC attack has not been established. On 23 April he was remanded in custody. The series of leaks continued regardless.

The problem is weapons in private households

Recreational hunting associations like to present themselves as guarantors of safety and order. The French cases show the opposite: anyone who records hundreds of thousands of weapon owners in poorly secured databases hands criminals a shopping list. Every stolen hunting weapon can end up in an act of violence. The real risk lies not only in IT, but in the sheer quantity of firearms stored in private homes for the sake of a hobby.

In Switzerland, too, recreational hunters keep their weapons at home. Wild beim Wild has repeatedly reported on acts of violence involving legally owned weapons, for example the fatal weapons check in Berngau and the missing weapons cross-check in offender monitoring. IG Wild beim Wild therefore calls for a psychological aptitude test for weapon owners. Further cases can be found in the section Crime & hunting.