France’s finance ministry has confimed reports that it suffered cyber attacks in December 2010.

The attacks targetted documents relating to the G20 summit of world economic powers, which took place in Paris last month, although budget minister Francois Baroin, the attackers succeeded only in accessing some "relatively unimportant documents".

News channel France24 reports that the attackers "took control" of 150 workstations at the ministry, having infected them using an email-borne Trojan.

Magazine Paris Match, which broke the story, quoted anonymous sources as saying that the "a certain amount of the information was redirected to Chinese sites" but "that [in itself] does not say very much."