European Central Bank Breach Shuts Down the Website

The European Central Bank (ECB) confirmed on Thursday, 15th August 2019 that it has deep impacted with the breach hit by a cyberattack that involved attackers injecting malware into one of its websites and led to a potential loss of data, eventually forcing the bank to shut down the site.

The European Central Bank (ECB) headquartered in Germany is the central bank of the 19 European Union countries which have adopted the euro and is itself responsible for supervising the data protection practices of the banking system across these countries. ECB confirmed that "unauthorized parties" had succeeded in breaching the security of its Banks’ Integrated Reporting Dictionary (BIRD) website. The site, hosted by a third party service provider, appears to have been attacked in December 2018, according to a Reuters report. The breach was discovered months later as routine maintenance work was being undertaken.

BIRD is a joint initiative of the Eurosystem to the euro zone's central banks and the banking system, which provides banks with a precise description of the data that aims to help reporting agents efficiently organize information stored in their internal systems and fulfill their reporting requirements,which is physically separate from any other external and internal ECB systems."

That data, affecting 481 subscribers, included names, position titles and email addresses but not passwords, according to the ECB which is contacting people whose data may have been compromised.

However, the ECB assured its users that the stolen information does not include their passwords and that "neither ECB internal systems nor market-sensitive data were affected" in the breach since the BIRD website is physically separate from other external and internal ECB systems.

The ECB said that it "takes data security extremely seriously" and have already informed the European Data Protection Supervisor about the incident. It has also started contacting people whose data may have been affected.

If you are one of those affected users, you are advised to beware of phishing emails and follow standard security practices while browsing online.