When a government agency confirms a breach only after a hacker begins advertising the stolen data for sale, the story is rarely about a zero-day exploit. It is almost always about the slow accumulation of small, preventable decisions — a misconfigured endpoint here, an over-privileged service account there — that an attacker eventually stitches together into a working path to sensitive records. The recently confirmed breach of a French government agency, with data now reportedly offered on underground markets, is a useful moment to step back and examine the technical controls that separate "we caught it early" from "we found out when a journalist called." Why Government Systems Are Attractive Targets The obvious answer is volume: a single breach can yield records on millions of citizens. But the deeper reason is structural.…