The agency has published its annual incident report for last year

Aug 20, 2013 08:14 GMT  ·  By

The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) has published its annual incident report for 2012. The goal of the report is to help organizations responsible for electronic communications in increasing the security and resilience of their networks.

According to the agency, the electronic communications sectors from EU member states reported a total of 79 significant incidents last year.

The report shows that the 79 incidents have been reported to national regulators in 18 countries. On the other hand, 9 countries haven’t reported any significant incidents.

Around 50% of the incidents impacted mobile telephony and mobile Internet. On average, 1.8 million users have been impacted per incident.

Worryingly, 37% of the reported outages impacted the European emergency number 112.

“System failures” have been named as the root cause in 75% of the incidents, the most common being hardware failures (routers and local exchange points), followed by software issues.

Third-party failures, mostly consisting of power supply failures, affected around 2.8 million people. System overloads impacted 9.4 million users.

While power failures and overloads affected the largest number of people, incidents caused by natural phenomena, such as storms and heavy snowfall, lasted the longest – on average, around 36 hours.

“The EU collaboration behind this report is key to improving the security and resilience of electronic communications networks in the EU, as well as for security in other critical sectors,” commented Executive Director of ENISA, Professor Udo Helmbrecht.

“Reporting major incidents helps us understand what went wrong, why, and how to prevent similar incidents from happening again. ENISA, with all National Reporting Authorities across the EU, will continue delivering practical lessons learned, that could significantly improve the security of our telecommunication infrastructure.”

The complete report is available here.