Customers still 'in the dark' on cyber crime, warns EU agency
Cyber crime worth billions of euros is going unreported because companies are failing to admit to security breaches, according to a paper released Tuesday (28 August) by the EU's internet security agency.
In "Cyber incident reporting in the EU" the European Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA) highlighted a series of regulatory gaps in EU cyber laws. In its conclusions, ENISA admitted that although "large outages and large data breaches receive extensive media coverage.... many breaches, however, remain undetected and if detected, are not reported to authorities and not known to the public."
The report highlighted five major cyber incidents which all went unreported, including an 'IP hijacking' case in April 2010 where China Telecom fed incorrect routing information instructing US and other international Internet traffic to feed through Chinese servers, swallowing 15% of global Internet use in less than 20 minutes.
In a press statement accompanying the report, co-authors Dr Marnix Dekker and Chris Karsberg admitted that “cyber incidents are most commonly kept secret when discovered, leaving customers and policymakers in the dark about frequency, impact and root causes.”
Commenting that the "lack of transparency and lack of information about incidents makes it difficult for policy makers to understand the overall impact", the report added that this, in turn, "complicates the effort in the industry to understand and address cyber security incidents."
Under the EU Telecoms directive adopted in 2009, service providers are required to report "all significant security breaches" to ENISA and national data supervisors. Meanwhile, provisions of the recently adopted e-privacy directive requires service providers to report all security lapses compromising personal data.
ENISA revealed that it had received 51 incident reports for 2011-2012, the first year of mandatory reporting requirements, saying that it would publish an overview of cyber-security breaches in September and annual reports from spring 2013 onwards.
However, the data was incomplete, with a number of member states yet to implement the directive in to national law, it said. ENISA executive director, Professor Udo Helmbrecht insisted that EU cyber policy should extend the reporting provisions for companies describing it as "essential to obtain a true cyber security picture."
A Eurobarometer in July revealed that one in ten Europeans had been victims of data theft, while online security firm McAfee estimated that cyber-crime cost businesses $750bn (€600bn) in lost income across the world in 2011.
EU Digital Agenda Commissioner Neelie Kroes has repeatedly promised plans for a detailed cyber security strategy, including a European Cyber-Crime Centre based in Europol's Dutch headquarters which will start work in 2013. Speaking in January at the World Economic Forum, Kroes called for concerted action on cyber-crime claiming that there was a 10% chance of a major break-down of the worldwide computer network.