A total of 153 major incidents related to the security of telecommunications networks and services were notified to the European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) in 2019, according to a report published on Thursday 23 July. This is a fairly consistent trend from last year, when 157 incidents were reported.
This ninth annual report shows that the most frequent cause of telecommunications incidents is system crashes. However, the frequency and overall impact of these crashes have tended to decrease over the last 4 years. On the other hand, incidents caused by human error, which account for a quarter of incidents (26%), have doubled compared to last year. And incidents due to third-party errors have tripled.
The report also indicates that these incidents resulted in the loss of nearly 1 billion user hours.
However, ENISA regrets that the incident report “does not show the full landscape of threats to telecommunications security”. For example, the agency explains, security incidents that do not cause significant network disruption are currently not subject to reporting obligations. And it celebrated the fact that the Electronic Communications Code, which has a transposition deadline of 21 December 2021, provides for new obligations to report incidents.
This new 2018/1972 Directive now covers operators using circumvention (such as Skype and Whatsapp) and now addresses security incidents that do not cause significant network disruptions (such as tapping an undersea cable) rather than merely concerning network/service outages, ENISA was pleased to note.
“Security incident reporting is important in order to get hard numbers about incidents, to analyse root causes and impact, which helps prevent future incidents. It is essential to collect this data, not only at EU-level, but also at national level. The Covid-19 outbreak shows more clearly than ever the importance of securing telecom networks”, commented Jakub Boratyński on behalf of the European Commission.
The report is available by following the link: https://bit.ly/2CxurLv (Original version in French by Sophie Petitjean)