The European Banking Authority (EBA) suffered a hacker attack against its Microsoft Exchange servers. The cyberattack is affecting many organizations around the world. The EBA has launched "a rapid investigation, in close collaboration with its IT service providers, a team of legal experts and other relevant entities".
The European agency communicated it on Sunday evening, specifying that “those responsible for the attack may have obtained personal emails contained on those servers” and is verifying what data may have been stolen. The EBA explained that since "the vulnerability is related to the Authority's e-mail servers, access to personal data via e-mail messages stored on these servers could have been obtained by the attacker". As a precautionary measure, the Authority has therefore decided to take its e-mail systems offline.
That of cyberattacks on companies and institutions it is becoming an increasingly widespread problem around the world. In 2020, according to the data contained in the Report of Clusit, the Italian Association for IT Security, registered the negative record of cyber attacks. In the world, the serious ones that reached the headlines were 1.871, 12% more than in 2019, causing global damage for a figure that is worth twice the Italian GDP.
In detail, according to the report, 10% of cyberattacks perpetrated last year were exploited the Covid theme and vaccines. According to the authors, there are an average of 156 serious attacks per month, the highest value ever recorded to date, with the worst in December, when 200 were detected. 81% of these serious attacks had as a purpose to extort money from victims, while 14% of the total is represented by cyber-espionage activities against research institutions and companies involved in the development of vaccines against Covid-19.
“The data shows us once again that the continuous acceleration of cybercrime has an ever greater impact on our society,” he says Gabriele Faggioli, president of Clusit. "The extraordinary growth of cyber threats, especially in the last four years, has caught all the stakeholders of our digital civilization unawares and now represents a global 'tax' on the use of ICT that doubles the value of GDP Italian estimated in 2020, considering the direct and indirect economic losses due to the theft of intellectual property”, adds Andrea Zapparoli Manzoni, co-author of the Clusit analysis.
