Another Cyber Attack Hits Europe

When Estonia suffered a series of cyber attacks in recent months, US official John Negroponte told the Financial Times: “We need to prepare ourselves because this is likely only to become more of an issue in the future.” Well, the future is here. And the wave of cyber attacks has moved from Eastern to Western Europe. It has recently been disclosed that around the time Estonia was under cyber attack, an important Spanish domain-registration company was also waging a battle against unknown cyber pirates. The Cyber Terrorism Division of the Spanish Police is investigating the incident. If identified, the hackers involved could be prosecuted for blackmailing a company to prevent the disclosure of confidential information.

There seems to be a disagreement regarding the severity of the situation. While some reports claim that the private data of hundreds of thousands of Internet users is in the hands of criminals, the leading Spanish company in the domain registration and web hosting business, Arsys, has issued a statement denying this information. Executives concede the company has experienced what they describe as “a security incident, compromising some client data.” However, they say, none of the data in question involves email, bank account or credit card passwords and therefore, they claim there’s no risk of illegal access into bank or email accounts.       

According to Arsys, hackers reportedly stole FTP codes, enabling them to insert a link to an external server containing malicious code, in the web pages of some clients. As soon as the company detected the incident, executives say it eliminated the link from the web pages, notified affected clients and boosted security measures across the board. To comply with legal requirements, executives add the company has reported the incident to the Cyber Terrorism Division of the Spanish Police. They confirm the incident is under investigation and may end up in court.

The attackers reportedly used servers located in the United States and Russia. According to the latest Symantec Internet Security Threat Report, the United States is the top country for malicious threat activity, accounting for 31% of the worldwide total, followed by China (10%), Germany (7%), France (4%), United Kingdom (4%), South Korea (4%), Canada (3%), Spain (3%), Taiwan (3%) and Italy (3%). Meanwhile, law enforcement authorities have detained a Russian teenager suspected of involvement in the Estonian cyber attacks. The youth reportedly called for massive cyber attacks against Estonian servers in Internet forums.