Lessons from the Louvre: strengthening cybersecurity

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When thieves targeted Napoleon-era crown jewels, they were exploiting specific vulnerabilities

Here are some take-aways to apply to your cybersecurity

On Sunday, October 19, 2025 at 9:30 AM four criminals approached Paris’ Louvre Museum and left seven minutes later with eight pieces of French royal jewelry containing 8,000 stones set in gold.

The amount of chatter and press this daytime burglary got made it out to be a bit of a ridiculous joke – including the cellphone capture of two of the perpetrators descending slowly on the stolen truck-ladder to the street level.

But here’s what else you should know: the police were on the scene in three minutes from being alerted. This crime was well-planned (as explained, below), if not well-executed (what with the thieves dropping the imperial crown and leaving a glove and hardhat and truck with DNA at the scene). And even though suspects have been caught, the jewelry remains missing and represents French national history and more than a hundred million dollars.

So let’s see what we can understand from this well-reported theft:

Crown jewels

What in your organization is equivalent to France’s crown jewels? Meaning, what is most important? Is it your literal money in the bank? Is it advancements you’ve made in research and development? Is it your client data?

Having a clear picture of what’s most important to protect will put you on the actual path to protection. And that path looks like this, ask yourself:

1. What security gaps am I currently aware of?
2. What are the symptoms that have revealed these vulnerabilities?
3. If these security holes were exploited maliciously, what would happen to my organization?
4. If I don’t take action on these risks, what losses won’t I be able to prevent or reverse?

France’s crown jewels are not and may never be recovered (the leading speculation is that the identifiable stones will be recut, the gold melted).

It’s an imperfect parallel with the museum heist, because the fact is: once your data is gone there is no getting it back.

Criminal reconnaissance

The Louvre thieves knew their target. Before the day they attacked, they had learned:

• which bucket truck to steal so that they wouldn’t raise suspicions, but blend in to the Parisian streets (these are known by locals as montemeubles – a common sight for moving furniture in and out of old apartment buildings)
• to wear the yellow vests that would make them pass for workers – there is facility restoration going on at the Louvre currently
• what window had no camera
• which cases contained the most valuable items – the fifth case into the room and the one adjacent, not just the case nearest their point of entry
• when to attack – Director of Security at the Gardner Museum (that had its own highly-publicized heist in 1990) Anthony Amore: The thieves must have known something about security mechanisms being disengaged, because the museum was now open but also that that gallery would be empty at that moment.²
• how much time they had – one of the burglars was seen diving head-first out the window into the bucket; the police arrived just after they left on scooters.

We don’t know how these crooks got all this information (some seems obvious). In cybercrime criminals use similar information-gathering tactics, too. This shows up in both targeted attacks, which we’ll look at below, and even in broadcast phishing attacks. In broadcast phishing attacks, criminals begin by knowing popular brands to spoof (like Chase Bank or Costco), but when their bad-intentioned links are clicked they learn:

• first the email address of those most vulnerable to being attacked
• which brand to use against this particular link-clicker as the attack unfolds
• log-in credentials, by directing the victims to a page which asks for them
• and/or other identifiers (‘confirm your name,’ and ‘address’ and ‘phone’)
• or credit card numbers (‘urgent: your payment didn’t go through, enter your credit card below’).

And moving beyond these kinds of broadcast phishing attacks, the reconnaissance phase looks a lot worse. Criminals gain information and access about organizations through what’s called OSINT (Open Source Intelligence) like their websites, LinkedIn, Social Media and by Googling the organization and individual people connected to the organization. And by social engineering:

[Jeff Crume explained]: People … have this tendency as humans to trust other people. Even if you’re very jaded, you see someone walking toward a building, their arms are full of stuff and it’s raining and you’re at the door, so maybe you hold the door open for them. But if that person was planning to do that as a way to get into the building, well, then they basically just socially engineered you into letting them come into the building and tailgate without using their badge.

Social engineering is [at the heart of attacks like] phishing emails, telephone scams and things like that. Our tendency to trust and in one context, that’s a beautiful thing because we wouldn’t want everyone to be so jaded that we never trusted another person ever again, but we can’t be trusting of everything either.

The attackers are always gonna try to find that crack that they can exploit and they keep changing their tactics. They keep changing different ways of doing this. Phishers originally used mostly just email, now they’ve moved into other areas as well. In addition to email, they could do an SMS message [known as smishing]. They could do phishing via voicemail, we call that vishing.

How would a cyberattack like this unfold?

Here’s a famous one perpetrated on the small business belonging to ABC’s Shark Tank’s Barbara Corcoran. In February 2020 a criminal hacker took to the inbox of Corcoran’s bookkeeper, spoofing the email address of the TV-star’s assistant and requesting $388,000 funds to be wired to an Asian bank with an attached invoice for real estate renovations. Because the email looked like a direct message from the assistant and the hacker responded so professionally and accurately in their email correspondence to confirm the request — a social engineer who clearly did their research into Corcoran’s business affairs — the bookkeeper was fooled¹.

So how come every human bookkeeper (or whomever) is just not replaced by an AI. Well, AIs in their algorithmic-way get the equivalent of fooled, too. One of the top trends emerging with the rise of AI cyber-defenses is criminal-use of legitimate software as the entryway to systems. As an example, and these can become much more granular systems-level executables than this example, if an AI sees a legitimate remote-access tool (like TeamViewer or AnyDesk) it will probably not flag it. This is why the human-AI partnerships, as well as other kinds of fail-safes (like rules-based anti-malware) are critical.

Innovation

The Louvres’ display cases were built in 2019. They were designed to withstand about 140 hammer or ax blows – the idea is that it’s enough to tire out a thief.

So the thieves’ use of disc grinders was considered by investigators to be innovative.

Cybercriminals, too, are continually looking for cracks that will allow them a foothold. This is why software patching is vital, as an example. The bad actors’ relentlessness means staying up-to-date in defensive tools and methods is very important.

One clearly-seen shift in tactics over last few years has been in ransomware that encrypts your data and requires a ransom to decrypt it. A newer and now more-common attack is extortionware – in which the data is not only encrypted but also exfiltrated from your systems. The threat is that not only do you lose the ability to work, but the exfiltrated data will be released to the dark web or the wider web. And this can harm your organization and also whatever client data is in a lost database.

The defense for older-style ransomware was clear: backups that can have you working again with minimal interruption.

Now, backups are still key if systems are encrypted, but when data is gone it’s gone. You cannot get it back. The threat of criminal exposure of that data remains forever, whether or not a ransom is paid. In other words, say you pay the ransom and they decrypt your systems and they tell you they won’t release your data on the web? What’s keeping them from going back to the well (that is, you) again when they’re in need of some ready cryptocurrency?

The only protection against data exfiltration is a coordinated, up-to-date, layered defense that doesn’t let the bad guys in to begin with. Bryley’s layered pyramid gives an idea of how we’d approach it (with the caveat that every organization/situation is different and needs to be considered) – the more foundational tools are at the foot of the pyramid.

Outcomes

This is not quite everyday delinquency … but it is a type of delinquency that we do not generally associate with the upper echelons of organized crime, Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau said of the Louvre attack. Beccuau said the profiles of the people under arrest so far are not typical of organized crime pros who carry out complex operations. These are clearly local people. They all live more or less in Seine-Saint-Denis [a low-income area].

The Louvre criminals apparently tried to light the truck on fire, but ended up leaving more physical evidence instead, like a helmet by the truck. They abandoned the ladder truck and fled on scooters driven by accomplices. Arrests of three people have been made at the time of writing, including two who admitted to be a part.

These two, who left their DNA at the scene, may only be pawns of someone who studied the museum, who figured the crime out including having the know-how to extricate the gems from the jewelry so they can be resold. The criminals in custody probably, by design, do not know where the jewelry is. This is similar to the Boston Globe reporter who had her debit card lifted. Someone was prosecuted in that case – but that person was likely only an opportunistic pawn behind someone else’s scheme³. A mastermind is clever enough to put someone else’s neck on the front line.

What the Louvre wouldn’t give to have the jewels back. And that remains a bleak hope.

But for stolen-data crimes? Once customer data, proprietary info or financial records are in criminal hands, they’re out there forever – copied, shared with always the possibility it can be weaponized against you. For organizations, an irreversible data loss can mean the end of the organization. So prevention against the loss of your most important data is the only approach that can work with cybercrime.

^{1 https://www.mitnicksecurity.com/the-history-of-social-engineering Kevin Mitnick is possibly the first cyber-hacker.
2 https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/how-did-they-rob-the-louvre-art-theft-expert-shares-his-thoughts/3830548/
3 https://www.bostonglobe.com/2024/05/15/magazine/on-the-trail-of-my-identity-thief/}

^{Sources:
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/30/world/europe/inside-louvre-jewel-heist.html
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2025/10/20/world/europe/louvre-robbery-jewelry-heist-photos-maps.html
href=”https://www.boston.com/news/world-news/2025/11/03/louvre-suspects/
https://www.reuters.com/world/louvre-heist-work-petty-criminals-not-organised-crime-prosecutor-says-2025-11-02/
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/11/05/louvre-heist-suspect-motorcyclist-paris-france/
https://www.france24.com/en/france/20251019-louvre-robbery-shuts-down-world-renowned-museum-for-a-day-french-culture-minister-says
https://www.ft.com/content/d0e3e9bf-c146-4c7d-acec-e204fcabbf1e}