Click:手机号微信检测

Commission hacked: What we know and don’t know

Commission says there was no data breach and the only loss was in man hours.

The European Commission was the victim of a “large scale” cyberattack, which brought down its internet access for hours Thursday as the institutions braced for more waves.

The Commission’s IT services sent an email to staff around 6 p.m. which described the attack as a “denial of service … which resulted in the saturation of our internet connection.”

“No data breach has occurred,” a Commission spokesperson told POLITICO. “The attack has so far been successfully stopped with no interruption of service, although connection speeds have been affected for a time.”

The loss was in man hours. “No one could work this afternoon, since the internet was gone twice, for several hours,” one staffer said.

What we know

The attack started in the afternoon, around 3 p.m. or a little later.

Millions of requests to access the Commission’s website were sent at the same time, resulting in an overload for the institutions’ servers in what is called a distributed denial-of-service attack. Such attacks aim to take down websites, but can be a diversion to attempt to break into the IT system.

The Commission’s team were still fighting off the attack late in the evening, but a source at the Commission’s DIGIT team said the situation was under control.

The team working to fend off the attack prepared for new waves of requests to their servers, which is often the case in such attacks.

Apart from sending traffic to the EU’s main website, the attackers also targeted network gateways resulting in outages on the internet service of the institution’s staff.

The EU’s cyber emergency response team (CERT-EU) was provided with details of the threat by the Commission’s IT security team.

Click Here: gws giants guernsey 2019

What we don’t know

The identity or origin of the hackers remains unknown or was not revealed. The Commission also did not give further details on their actions to counter the attack, out of precaution.

Denial of service attacks are often executed in waves. Sources said they did not know when to expect a next wave or for how long it would last.