European Central Bank (ECB) discloses data breach in BIRD Newsletter

The European Central Bank (ECB) announced that threat actors had access for months to the contact information of hundreds of financial industry subscribers to its newsletter

The ECB was the victim of a data breach, the bank announced that hackers had access for several months to the contact information of hundreds of financial industry subscribers to its newsletter. The intrusion was discovered during regular maintenance work.

The good news is that the BIRD website was run on an external server that is separated from the ECB infrastructure, according to the bank neither internal systems nor market-sensitive data were affected.

According to the organization, hackers infected with a malware an external server that hosts the Banks’ Integrated Reporting Dictionary (BIRD). Attackers had access to email addresses, names and position titles of 481 subscribers to the BIRD newsletter, the organization confirmed that passwords were not exposed.

“Unauthorised parties… breached the security measures protecting (the ECB’s) Banks’ Integrated Reporting Dictionary (BIRD) website,” read a statement issued by the bank.

“It was possible that the contact data of 481 subscribers to the BIRD newsletter may have been captured,”

According to AFP, intruders were inside the BIRD system since at least December.

The BIRD website provides financial institutions with details on how to produce statistical and supervisory reports for ECB supervisory teams.

The ECB is notifying the incident to people potentially affected.

In July 2014, hackers stole user contact information and other data from a database of the European Central Bank website in an attempt of extortion.

At the time, the European Central Bank confirmed that the hackers exploited a vulnerability to access a website database, fortunately, no internal system was affected by the attack.

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Pierluigi Paganini

(SecurityAffairs – ECB, data breach)

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