France’s foremost submarine-builder, Naval Group, revealed that its sensitive data concerning its surface ship and submarines may have been targeted by cyber attackers.
An investigation is currently underway to determine the credibility of the claim and to verify the authenticity, origin, and ownership of the data as quickly as possible.
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“At this stage, no intrusion into our IT environments has been detected”, the company affirmed in a statement in a social media post on 26 July 2025, “and there has been no impact on our activities”.
The hackers are said to have published 30 gigabytes of information in an online forum that they claim relates to the combat management system of the company’s submarines and frigates, and said they have one terabyte of data, according to reporting from the Financial Times.
Naval Group offer the SETIS system for surface ships for various missions and the SUBTICS system for submarines, including integration of weapon handling and launching systems.
The company also offer the United Arab Emirates Navy a unique system, know as the National Combat Management System, which leverages local technologies and is led by the Tawazun Council.
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By GlobalDataSovereignty at stake
Naval Group is a naval supplier for countries all over the world. It is the primary manufacturer of France’s Suffren-class nuclear-powered attack submarines (SSNs), the Scorpene diesel-electric submarines (SSKs) that recently entered the Indonesian Navy, and the Franco-Italian FREMM frigates among many other platforms and systems.
At a time when informational warfare and destabilisation tactics are growing in this dubious space between peace and war, often called the ‘gray-zone’, it is becoming more difficult to protect a country’s technological edge in the defence industry.
In this backdrop, global defence primes are an obvious target as they are intimately tied to a nation’s economy and defence. In the UK, for example, government policy claims to prize defence as an engine for growth at a time when nations are pursuing strategic autonomy amid global animosity.
Meanwhile, in France, Naval Group states that it is a driver for the country’s naval industry with 90% of added value created in France and tens of thousands of indirect jobs.
Naval Group is a French-law public limited company whose capital is held by the French state (62.25%), Thales (35%), employees and former employees of the company and its subsidiaries via the Sharenariat Naval Group corporate mutual fund (1.74%), and the company Naval Group Actionnariat (indirectly 100% owned by Naval Group – Self-control) (0.99%) and directly by employees of the company (0.02%).
Cybersecurity
A team of cybersecurity experts and the group’s Computer Emergency Response Team are supporting the ongoing technical investigations.
Cyber attacks can range from espionage and data breaches to sabotage and misinformation, each with the potential to compromise national security and disrupt military operations. Failure to invest in cybersecurity enables hostile actors to gain control over destructive weapons or weaken critical infrastructure.
The future of warfare will focus on the ability to gather, analyse, and disseminate information in real-time to support decision-making. This relies on coordinating military operations through command, control, communications, computers, intelligence, surveillance, and reconnaissance.
A successful cyberattack could result in hostile nation-state actors, such as North Korea, Russia, and Iran, gaining control over military assets and disrupting key capabilities such as communications and data transfer systems.
In a report, ‘Cybersecurity in Defense’ (2024), GlobalData forecasts that the global cybersecurity market will be worth $290bn by 2027.
