Theft at the Louvre, the password was… the museum’s name: the heist exposes poor governance of digital security

On 19 October 2025, in the heart of Paris, a gang of thieves pulled off a heist that will go down in the annals. In a matter of minutes, using a lifting basket mounted on a lorry, they broke into the Louvre Museum, forced a window in the Galerie d’Apollon, and stole at least eight jewels belonging to the French Crown Jewels, among the most precious of the national heritage. The theft, which took place under the eyes of an apparently active video surveillance system, immediately raised questions about the robustness of the museum’s digital defences. Then came the discovery that left everyone speechless: the security server password was simply ‘Louvre’. A confirmation reported by TGCom24, Corriere della Sera, Sky TG24 and La Repubblica and not denied by the French authorities.

The key was ‘Louvre’: a symbolic vulnerability

The Louvre is not just any museum: it is a global icon, visited by more than eight million people a year. If its digital infrastructure turned out to be vulnerable because of a trivial password, it means that the problem lies not only in the forced window but in the decision-making processes governing internal security. The choice of such a predictable credential signals a cultural flaw even before the technical one. In a context where even a simple intrusion attempt can be planned through OSINT and targeted reconnaissance, using the very name of the institution as a password is tantamount to leaving the key stuck in the lock. The heist was not just a failure of physical vigilance: it is a reflection of superficial IT governance, lacking controls, audits and a culture of digital accountability.

The crucial role of the system administrator

Behind every technological infrastructure there is a key figure: the system administrator. It is he who defines access policies, password rotation, privilege management, and log security. In the case of the Louvre, it is evident that the chain of control is broken at this very level. No automatic rotation mechanism, no multi-factor authentication, no alert for anomalous logins. Security, in these cases, is not compromised by sophisticated hackers but by elementary errors in credential management. This is the price one pays when technology is entrusted to bureaucratic processes instead of up-to-date technical expertise. A museum may have state-of-the-art alarms and armoured glass, but if passwords remain the default or easily guessed ones, its digital defence has already collapsed.

Double wall: physical and logical

The theft at the Louvre shows how modern security can no longer be only perimeter-based. Physical defences – walls, shop windows, alarms – are useless if they do not dialogue with logical defences, i.e. IT infrastructures and authentication systems. The thieves used tools, not weapons. They acted as technicians, exploiting the ambiguity between maintenance and intrusion. The digital vulnerability amplified the physical one, allowing a well-organised group to neutralise millions in technology in a matter of minutes. In the language of computer security, it is called double wall failure: when the physical and digital barriers do not integrate, a single weakness opens all doors.

The underestimation of risk

After the outcry, the French Ministry of Culture admitted a ‘chronic underestimation of the risk’, an expression also echoed by Reuters and Le Monde. The museum, like many public institutions, suffered from maintenance delays, incomplete updates, outdated IT protocols and fragmented management between internal staff and external providers. A typical model of inefficient governance, where security is treated as an incidental expense and not as part of the heritage to be protected. This negligence does not only affect the Louvre: it is a widespread paradigm. Servers configured by third parties, default passwords never changed, access shared between multiple users, lack of regular audits. It is the antechamber of every computer incident.

The lesson of the Louvre

The case must become a universal warning. Passwords are not a technical detail, but the first line of defence of any organisation. Effective governance requires centralised policies, multi-factor authentication, constant review of credentials and automatic alert systems. Digital security cannot be left to the goodwill of a single technician or the memory of an administrator: it must be a documented, audited and supervised procedure. As the Louvre demonstrated, the difference between a secure system and a disaster can be in a six-letter word.

The moral of the story

The theft at the Louvre was not just a spectacular heist: it was a symptom of a systemic problem. When one of the most heavily guarded institutions in the world is compromised by a trivial password, we are not talking about bad luck but about an absence of a security culture. In an age when every network, every server and every device represents a potential access point, password governance becomes the true defence perimeter. An aware administrator knows this: the safest password is not the longest, but the one that no one would ever have the bad taste to choose