The institution is taking the recent spate of attacks seriously, holding comprehensive cybersecurity assessments and regularly replacing officials’ phones and devices, two Commission officials said.<\/p>\n
The Commission is investigating a cyberattack<\/a> on its websites, with early findings suggesting some data was stolen, the institution said Friday. In January the Commission said<\/a> it had found evidence of a cyberattack on the technical infrastructure it uses to manage its mobile devices, which \u201cmay have resulted\u201d in hackers gaining access to staff names and mobile numbers.<\/p>\n Hacking and Signal vulnerability is an issue not just for the Commission. Intelligence services in the Netherlands warned<\/a> last month of a \u201clarge-scale global cyber campaign,\u201d in which hackers from the Kremlin posed as a fake Signal support chatbot to trick officials into revealing their app PIN codes. French<\/a>, German<\/a>, Portuguese<\/a> and British<\/a> security services issued similar alerts.<\/p>\n \u201cThe best option you have right now is Signal, Threema, and after that, to a certain degree, WhatsApp,\u201d said Herpig of Interface. Threema is a Swiss-developed encrypted messaging app.<\/p>\n Signal and WhatsApp lack features required for government comms, said Matthew Hodgson, chief executive of Element, a company that built tech used by multiple European governments for secure messaging apps. “You can’t kick somebody out of a WhatsApp group if they get fired from the government. You have no single sign-on, no authentication access control \u2026 you have a single point of failure.”<\/p>\n The use of Signal by government officials drew a spotlight last year after the editor-in-chief of U.S. magazine The Atlantic was accidentally added to a Signal group chat containing some of the most senior members of the U.S. government, including Vice President JD Vance, in which they discussed detailed military plans \u2014 in a breach of security dubbed Signalgate<\/a>. The episode highlighted the extent to which commercial messaging apps have become embedded in government operations.<\/p>\n Koen Verhelst contributed reporting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The institution is taking the recent spate of attacks seriously, holding comprehensive cybersecurity assessments and regularly replacing officials’…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":4112,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[588,39,40,662,663,99,2128,70,1285,4098,121,451,45],"class_list":["post-4111","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-eu","tag-cybersecurity","tag-eu","tag-european-union","tag-hackers","tag-infrastructure","tag-intelligence","tag-intelligence-services","tag-kremlin","tag-military","tag-mobile","tag-security","tag-services","tag-united-states"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4111","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4111"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4111\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4112"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4111"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4111"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/europe\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4111"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}