European Commission Suffers Major Security Incident

A spokesperson confirmed that the European Commission, together with other European Union organizations, was hit by a cyberattack last week. The authorities did not disclose any details about the type of threats that hit the institutions, or the alleged threat actors behind the attack.

According to reporters Alberto Nardelli and Natalia Drozdiak, the spokesperson stated –

We are working closely with CERT-EU, the Computer Emergency Response Team for all EU institutions, bodies and agencies and the vendor of the affected IT solution. Thus far, no major information breach was detected.

Source

According to a person familiar with the matter, senior officials at the commission were alerted, meaning that the attack was serious. The same person claimed that the incident is bigger than the usual cyberattacks that regularly hit the EU. Another EU official said that staff had recently been warned about potential phishing attempts.

The European Commission raised alert levels by setting up a 24/7 monitoring service and implementing the necessary mitigating measures.

At the time of this writing, there is no news of a major data breach, but the investigation is still ongoing and is still in an early stage.

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Unfortunately, the European Commission is not the first EU organization targeted in recent months.

On March 7^th, the European Banking Authority (EBA) released an official statement saying it has removed all e-mail systems after their Microsoft Exchange Servers were hacked as part of the continuous attacks. EBA is part of the European System of Financial Guidance and it manages the stability organized performance of the EU banking sector.

Last December, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) has been the subject of a cyberattack. Following the hack, EMA launched a full investigation, in close cooperation with law enforcement and other relevant entities.

Subsequently, EMA revealed that some of the unlawfully accessed documents related to COVID-19 medicines and vaccines have been leaked online to undermine the public’s trust in COVID-19 vaccines.