Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Cybercrime

European Central Bank Blackmailed by Hackers

The European Central Bank (ECB), the organization that administers the monetary policy of the Eurozone, announced on Thursday that it had suffered a data breach in which some contact information was stolen.

The European Central Bank (ECB), the organization that administers the monetary policy of the Eurozone, announced on Thursday that it had suffered a data breach in which some contact information was stolen.

According to a statement published on its website, the ECB became aware of the incident after the attackers sent a blackmail email “seeking financial compensation for the data.” The cybercriminals supposedly gained access to a database that’s used to store registration data for conferences and visits. While most of the data is encrypted, email addresses, phone numbers and street addresses are not, the ECB said. Data on downloads from the ECB website is also included in the database, but was also encrypted.

Since the breached database is physically separate from internal systems, the organization is confident that market sensitive data has not been compromised.

“The ECB is contacting people whose email addresses or other data might have been compromised and all passwords have been changed on the system as a precaution,” the organization stated. “The ECB takes data security extremely seriously. German police have been informed of the theft and an investigation has started.”

The vulnerability leveraged by the attackers to gain unauthorized access to the website has been patched, the ECB said.

 The Associated Press reported that roughly 20,000 email addresses were obtained by the attackers, but the number of compromised phone numbers and street addresses is smaller.

 

Written By

Eduard Kovacs (@EduardKovacs) is a managing editor at SecurityWeek. He worked as a high school IT teacher for two years before starting a career in journalism as Softpedia’s security news reporter. Eduard holds a bachelor’s degree in industrial informatics and a master’s degree in computer techniques applied in electrical engineering.

Click to comment

Trending

Daily Briefing Newsletter

Subscribe to the SecurityWeek Email Briefing to stay informed on the latest threats, trends, and technology, along with insightful columns from industry experts.

Understand how to go beyond effectively communicating new security strategies and recommendations.

Register

Join us for an in depth exploration of the critical nature of software and vendor supply chain security issues with a focus on understanding how attacks against identity infrastructure come with major cascading effects.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

Cybercrime

The changing nature of what we still generally call ransomware will continue through 2023, driven by three primary conditions.

Cybercrime

As it evolves, web3 will contain and increase all the security issues of web2 – and perhaps add a few more.

Cybercrime

A recently disclosed vBulletin vulnerability, which had a zero-day status for roughly two days last week, was exploited in a hacker attack targeting the...

Cybercrime

Luxury retailer Neiman Marcus Group informed some customers last week that their online accounts had been breached by hackers.

Cybercrime

Zendesk is informing customers about a data breach that started with an SMS phishing campaign targeting the company’s employees.

Artificial Intelligence

The release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT in late 2022 has demonstrated the potential of AI for both good and bad.

Cybercrime

Satellite TV giant Dish Network confirmed that a recent outage was the result of a cyberattack and admitted that data was stolen.

Cybercrime

Patch Tuesday: Microsoft calls attention to a series of zero-day remote code execution attacks hitting its Office productivity suite.