A European Commission spokesperson revealed that the European Commission and several other European Union organizations were hit by a cyberattack in March.
According to the spokesperson, “the IT security incident” impacted IT infrastructure of multiple EU institutions, bodies, and 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 told BleepingComputer.
Following the attack, the Commission has set up a 24/7 monitoring services and is actively implementing the necessary security measures.
Authorities say they did not detect “major information breach” so far. Although no conclusive information is available, since the forensic analysis of the incident is still in the initial phase.
The spokesperson assured EU Commission takes the incident very seriously and is thoroughly investigating it:
“Let me use this occasion to recall that we take cybersecurity very seriously and apply strict policies to protect our infrastructures and devices,” the spokesperson added. “We investigate every incident.”
No further information about the nature of the incident or the identity of the attackers behind the attack has been revealed.
Last week, Bloomberg already reported that the attack hit the EU organizations. However, the European Commission spokesperson did not confirm that information at the time.
In addition, last month, all email systems of the European Banking Authority (EBA) went down when their Microsoft Exchange Servers were hit in the ongoing attacks on commercial and government organizations worldwide.
In another troublesome incident in January, the European Medicines Agency (EMA) confirmed Pfizer/BioNTech COVID-19 vaccine data had been stolen from its servers in December and consequently leaked online. Later, EMA claimed that some of the vaccine candidate data was doctored by threat actors before they leaked it online. It is believed they did this to undermine the public’s trust in COVID-19 vaccines.
