Security2 publishers3 min readPublished Updated
Venus1337 claims breaches at two Belgian sports federations days apart
Belgium's French-speaking gymnastics federation has confirmed that an intruder reached part of its IT environment and took data out. The table tennis federations, alerted Thursday, say checks of their systems and their web provider have found no sign of compromise so far.
The Watch · Security desk
What happened
- Jean-Michel Mureau, president of the French-speaking AFTT, confirmed an attack over the weekend and said the Royal Belgian Table Tennis Federation had also been affected.
- Belgium's French-speaking gymnastics federation confirmed that unauthorized individuals accessed part of its IT environment and extracted data, and it notified Belgian cybersecurity and data protection authorities.
- The AFTT said checks of its own systems and of its website provider had turned up no evidence of compromise and no sign that members' phone numbers or email addresses were taken.
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Why it matters
- contradiction One federation says data left its network; the other reports clean checks on both its own systems and its web provider's. A shared-platform explanation for the pair has nothing on the record behind it yet.
- exposure Judges' licenses and coaching qualifications identify who holds authority inside clubs. An attacker with that list can impersonate officials to volunteer administrators. That is the risk the FfG flagged.
- capability If the club administrative accounts Venus1337 claims are genuine, the attacker holds working logins at many small clubs that have no IT staff to notice their use.
- decision The AFTT has tied member notification to what its investigation finds; the FfG has already gone to the Belgian regulators.
The two federations are describing different situations. The FfG said unauthorized individuals got into part of its IT environment and extracted data [11]. "As soon as the incident was discovered, we called in experts," the federation said Thursday, adding that "the access route used was neutralized, the affected access points were secured, and our systems are now subject to enhanced monitoring" [12]. The AFTT said it had checked its own systems and those of the service provider responsible for its website [4]. "At this stage, the checks carried out have not revealed any evidence to suggest that its infrastructure has been compromised," the association said [5].
What links the two cases on the record is the handle. Venus1337 claimed credit for both, the gymnastics breach days earlier [10]. FrenchBreaches, a site that tracks leaks, reported the table tennis case first, and described samples containing names, membership numbers, member and user information, and records related to sporting sanctions [7].
The claimed haul at the table tennis federations is nearly 1.7 gigabytes, with records linked to more than 66,800 members and 17,400 users plus administrative accounts belonging to clubs [8]. That is 84,200 individuals [22]. Add the more than 200,000 members Venus1337 claimed at the gymnastics federation [16] and the total on offer is upwards of 284,200 records from two Belgian federations [23]. None of it has been independently verified [9], and the FfG has confirmed that personal data was affected without endorsing the number [16].
Mureau said the AFTT was alerted on Thursday and asked its IT provider to investigate the extent of the breach [3]. Neither federation has named a supplier common to both cases [24].
The FfG data is the more useful of the two sets to an attacker. Coaching qualifications, judges' licenses, postal addresses and the contents of accident reports [14] describe who holds authority inside clubs and what happened to whom. The federation said the information could be used for impersonation or to obtain further personal data, and that it had seen no misuse so far [15].
France has had a run of the same thing. More than 30 sports organizations there have reportedly been hit since late 2025, including the federations for tennis, skiing, swimming, sailing, golf, football and shooting [17]. There is no evidence connecting those cases to the Belgian ones [18]. French authorities detained an 18-year-old suspected member of ZeroBytes earlier this month, the group that claimed the French Handball Federation breach [19], and arrested a 20-year-old earlier this year over dozens of intrusions, among them the national gymnastics, sailing, athletics and motorsport federations [20].
The AFTT said it would notify affected individuals and take other required steps if its investigation determines that personal data was compromised [21].
What to watch
- Whether the FRBTT issues its own account of what left its systems, separate from the AFTT's provider checks.
- Whether the FfG or Belgian authorities describe the access route that was neutralized.
- Independent verification matching Venus1337's two sample sets to the same source system would establish one operator behind both.