European Commissioner for Budget and Administration, Johannes Hahn, confirmed the breach of certain EU agencies – as a result of the SolarWinds – in response to a question submitted by a member of the EU Parliament in February 2021.
The EU's official response is based on the results of an investigation conducted by its Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT-EU). CERT-EU confirmed that out of 14 EU organizations using SolarWinds' "Orion" monitoring software , 6 were compromised. However, CERT-EU did not reveal the names of the EU organizations that installed the "infected" Orion updates.
Read also: EU: The European Commission and other institutions suffered a cyberattack
In December 2020, SolarWinds revealed that 18,000 of its customers may have been affected by its hack. The troubling data appeared in a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) the previous week.
State-sponsored hackers allegedly linked to Russia have breached the networks of numerous U.S. government agencies, including the Treasury Department and the Commerce Department's National Telecommunications and Information Administration (NTIA). The breach allowed the malicious actors to spy on internal email traffic.
See also: US: Officially accuses SVR of SolarWinds hack – Sanctions and expulsion of Russian diplomats
A report published by the Washington Postattributes the attacks to APT29 (also known as Cozy Bear) – a Russia-linked APT group believed to have recently breached leading cybersecurity firm FireEye.
In January, the US FBI, CISA, ODNI and NSA issued a joint statement blaming Russia for the SolarWinds hack.
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Specifically, “TheRecord”, which first reported the news, reported the following: “CERT-EU officials claimed that they do not have a complete picture, as official EU bodies are not required to report security incidents to their agency, while reports are made voluntarily. In cases where it received information, CERT-EU said that some agencies sent limited information about the attacks, while in other reports, network logs, used to search for clues about the actions of hackers, were often unavailable.”
Last week, the EU also revealed a separate security breach of several of its official bodies, in an attack that still remains an unsolved mystery.
Information source: securityaffairs.co
