European Commission and other institutions were hit by a major cyber-attack

Not only the European Commission, but many other organizations of the European Union have been targeted by a cyberattack in March.

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

“A range of European Union institutions including the European Commission were hit by a significant cyber-attack last week.” reported Bloomberg. “The spokesperson said forensic analysis of the incident is still in its initial phase and that it’s too early to provide any conclusive information about the nature of the attack.”

The spokesperson explained that multiple EU institutions, agencies, and IT infrastructure, were impacted by an “IT security incident in their IT infrastructure.”

According to a person familiar with the matter cited by Bloomberg, the incident was more severe than the ones that usually hit the EU. An EU official also revealed that the staff was recently warned of ongoing phishing campaign against EU representatives.

The European Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-EU) is investigating the cyber attack with the support of various local CERTs and European law enforcement agencies.

“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,” the spokesperson said. “Thus far, no major information breach was detected.”

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.

Other EU organizations were hit by hackers in recent months, including the European Medicines Agency (EMA) and European Banking Authority (EBA).

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – hacking, European Commission)

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Pierluigi Paganini

Pierluigi Paganini is member of the ENISA (European Union Agency for Network and Information Security) Threat Landscape Stakeholder Group and Cyber G7 Group, he is also a Security Evangelist, Security Analyst and Freelance Writer. Editor-in-Chief at "Cyber Defense Magazine", Pierluigi is a cyber security expert with over 20 years experience in the field, he is Certified Ethical Hacker at EC Council in London. The passion for writing and a strong belief that security is founded on sharing and awareness led Pierluigi to find the security blog "Security Affairs" recently named a Top National Security Resource for US. Pierluigi is a member of the "The Hacker News" team and he is a writer for some major publications in the field such as Cyber War Zone, ICTTF, Infosec Island, Infosec Institute, The Hacker News Magazine and for many other Security magazines. Author of the Books "The Deep Dark Web" and “Digital Virtual Currency and Bitcoin”.