Investigation Concludes EU Parliement Webmail System Was Not Attacked

The investigation of unusual activity on the European Parliament's webmail system revealed that it was not the result of a cyber attack.

The EU Parliament has resumed normal webmail service operations after it was suspended last week in light of suspicious traffic.

The Parliament's IT staff looked at the system after the networks of the European Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) were targeted earlier last month.

Unusually high traffic was detected overnight, when most of the Parliament's members and staff are at home. This led to the decision to suspend service and perform a more thorough investigation.

A parliament spokesperson told PC World that the technical analysis did not reveal any compromise, organized attack or malware.

The traffic was caused by some mobile devices which connected automatically to the webmail during this night time, something which some companies have also experienced.

Nevertheless, the webmail service will remain suspended during night time, between 1 a.m and 6 a.m. for the next several days as a precaution.

The European Parliament and the EU Commission networks are separate and its very unlikely that an attack on one would affect the other.

The spokesperson also noted that a separate technical glitch caused a three-hour downtime of Parliament email systems on Wednesday.

While the EU Parliament's network was not attacked, the Commission's was targeted by an organized group of hackers shortly before a critical two-day summit on European Union's future economic strategy.

A similar attack hit the French finance ministry prior to the G20 summit in Paris in February. Over 150 computers were compromised in an attempt to steal sensitive documents.

Government institutions and agencies in other countries such as Australia, Canada or UK have also been targeted in what are believed to be cyber espionage attempts.