European Parliament Computer Network Targeted in Cyber Attack

The computer network of the European Parliament has been under attack for the past few days in a similar manner to how the European Commission computers were targeted a week ago.

An EU Parliament spokesperson confirmed the cyber attack for European Voice. "Information technology services are working day and night to investigate and have put in place some security measures," they said.

It seems the emails system is targeted in particular and one of the measures taken so far was to block webmail access.

Another official pointed out that the Parliament and Commission networks are separate and that this attack is clearly not the work of amateur hackers.

"This is not a couple of teenage boys hacking into the institutions," he said, suggesting that the real motive was espionage.

As mentioned, the attack, which is believed to have started on March 24, follows a similar one targeting the European Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) networks.

However, a similar incident occurred before the G20 summit in Paris last month, when over 150 computers from the French finance ministry were compromised in an attempt to steal sensitive documents.

The British Foreign Office also confirmed late last year that its staff was targeted in spear phishing attacks that tried to install information stealing trojans on official computers.

The Canadian and Australian governments also had to deal with cyber attacks targeting senior government officials and agencies.

Even with this increase in cyber espionage reports, Trend Micro's director of security research and communication, Rik Ferguson, doesn't think that much has changed in terms of frequency.

"International cyber-espionage and criminal theft of information for commercial advantage has been going on for several years now but only really caught the public imagination with the furore surrounding the Aurora attacks in 2009/2010," he said.