Connect with us

Hi, what are you looking for?

SecurityWeekSecurityWeek

Incident Response

EU to Impose Rules on Internet Firms to Prevent Cyber Attacks

EU member states and lawmakers have clinched a deal to prevent cyber attacks by requiring Internet firms like eBay, Amazon and Google to boost their defenses and report breaches, officials said Tuesday.

EU member states and lawmakers have clinched a deal to prevent cyber attacks by requiring Internet firms like eBay, Amazon and Google to boost their defenses and report breaches, officials said Tuesday.

They said the first EU-wide draft rules agreed late Monday would also oblige power companies, financial institutions as well as transport, health care and water providers to increase security and inform the authorities of attacks.

“This agreement is a major step in raising the level of cybersecurity in Europe,” the European’s Union’s digital commissioner Guenther Oettinger said on his blog.

Under the deal, the EU parliament said, online marketplaces like eBay, Amazon as well as search engines like Google and clouds will have to ensure the safety of their infrastructure and to report on major incidents.

Micro and small digital companies will be exempted from the rules, however.

European businesses and the overall economy lose hundreds of billions of euros a year to cybercrime and cyberattacks, Oettinger said.

“I will not sit back and let these criminals and cyber terrorists attack our businesses, intrude into our private lives and destroy trust in our digital economy and society,” he said.

The new rules are designed to boost consumer, government and business confidence in the technologies and systems that digital networks and services depend on, he said.

Advertisement. Scroll to continue reading.

They are also designed to ensure electricity, gas and transport sectors “can securely provide their essential services at home and across borders,” he added.

The rules, Oettinger said, are designed to buttress an ambitious plan unveiled earlier this year to overhaul Europe’s fragmented technology landscape to create a “single digital market.”

The European parliament said the deal still had to be approved by the legislature’s internal market committee and the 28 EU member states. It will enter into force as soon as it is published in the EU Official Journal.

Written By

AFP 2023

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.

Join the session as we discuss the challenges and best practices for cybersecurity leaders managing cloud identities.

Register

SecurityWeek’s Ransomware Resilience and Recovery Summit helps businesses to plan, prepare, and recover from a ransomware incident.

Register

Expert Insights

Related Content

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...

Data Breaches

LastPass DevOp engineer's home computer hacked and implanted with keylogging malware as part of a sustained cyberattack that exfiltrated corporate data from the cloud...

Incident Response

Microsoft has rolled out a preview version of Security Copilot, a ChatGPT-powered tool to help organizations automate cybersecurity tasks.

Data Breaches

GoTo said an unidentified threat actor stole encrypted backups and an encryption key for a portion of that data during a 2022 breach.

Application Security

GitHub this week announced the revocation of three certificates used for the GitHub Desktop and Atom applications.

Incident Response

Meta has developed a ten-phase cyber kill chain model that it believes will be more inclusive and more effective than the existing range of...

Cloud Security

VMware described the bug as an out-of-bounds write issue in its implementation of the DCE/RPC protocol. CVSS severity score of 9.8/10.