On Tuesday 3 October, MEPs called on the EU to strengthen its defences against cyber-attacks and online child pornography networks.
In a report prepared by Elissavet Vozemberg-Vrionidi (EPP, Greece) and approved by 603 votes to 27, with 39 abstentions, MEPs highlighted a range of concrete measures such as those to step up information exchanges by way of Eurojust, Europol and ENISA and to transpose directive 2011/93/EU in every member state on the fight against sexual abuse, sexual exploitation of children and child pornography.
Other requests made by the European Parliament include: giving Europol and Eurojust “appropriate resources” to accelerate the detection, analysis and referral of child abuse material and improve the identification of victims; ensuring that illegal online content be removed immediately by due legal process or that access is blocked from EU territory when removal is not feasible; investing in education to solve the lack of qualified IT professionals working in cybersecurity; promoting the use of encryption and other anonymisation tools; using EU funds for free and open-source software-based research into IT security; setting up teams to which businesses and consumers can report cybersecurity and establishing databases to record all types of cybercrime.
Parliament reports that 80% of companies in Europe experienced at least one cyber security incident last year and that Eurojust had received a 30% rise in signals in this connection.
In September, the European Commission proposed a whole range of initiatives in this domain, such as the European cyber security agency (the ENISA mandate has been strengthened) and more recently, tools for signalling and the easier withdrawal of illegal content from the web (see EUROPE 11872).
On Monday evening in Strasbourg, the Commissioner for the Security Union, Julian King, highlighted the scale of the cyber security challenge and the fact that attacks could be carried out, for example, locally and cheaply. (Original version in French by Solenn Paulic)