Brussels, 11/10/2012 (Agence Europe) - The European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) has published the first annual report on cyber safety incidents that have occurred in the European Union. Fifty-one severe outages of electronic communication networks or services were reported but this figure only reflects part of the story because several countries have only very recently set up their reporting systems. The executive director of ENISA, Professor Udo Helmbrecht, explained: “We are now, for the first time, equipped with an overview of major cyber incidents in Europe. This is a decisive moment for the EU's efforts to improve understanding of the impact of cyber security incidents. But this still deals with only a small subset of cyber security incidents. This type of reporting should be extended to cover a wider range of incidents and more sectors.”
Under Article 13a of the EU's telecom reform directive (Directive 2009/140/EC), EU member states are required to make summary reports on major outages once a year to ENISA and the European Commission. The first summary incident reports for 2011 were sent to ENISA in May 2012. In total, 11 countries reported outages. This number reflects the fact that many countries implemented national reporting schemes only towards the end of 2011. ENISA experts consider that “this year, the member states have more mature national incident reporting schemes. So next year we expect to publish an annual report with about 10 times more incidents.”
The annual report indicates that:
Most of the reported incidents affected mobile telephony or mobile internet (60%).
Incidents affecting mobile telephony or mobile internet affected most users (around 300.000 users), which is consistent with the high number of mobile users.
Incidents show that communication services (both fixed and mobile) strongly depend on the power supply.
Natural phenomena like storms, floods and heavy snow have a big impact on the power supply of providers. Natural phenomena cause long lasting incidents, around 45 hours on average. (IL/transl.fl)