European Parliament computer network breached

The computer network of the European Parliament has been targeted by a cyber attack that may or may not be linked to the attack against the European Commission and the External Action Service networks that took place a week ago.

According to the Parliament’s spokesmen, the attack was still ongoing yesterday morning and information technology services have put in place some security measures – such as blocking access to webmail.

“This is not a couple of teenage boys hacking into the [EU] institutions,” said an official. The Parliament and the Commission have separate networks, and so far it seems that they have been compromised in order to allow the attackers to snoop around and extract valuable information.

According to the European Voice, the attack on the Parliament’s networks was detected on March 24 – two days after the start of the attack on the Commission and the External Action Service – which has led officials to assume that the attacks very likely coordinated.

Wether they attackers are the same ones that targeted French government computer networks in search for documents regarding to the G20 summit held in Paris in February, is difficult to tell. At the time, unnamed internal sources speculated about the possibility of the Chinese government being behind it, since some of the files were redirected to Chinese sites.