European Central Bank Shuts Down ‘BIRD Portal’ After Getting Hacked

Headquartered in Germany, the European Central Bank (ECB) is the
central bank of the 19 European Union countries which have adopted
the euro and is itself responsible for supervising the data
protection practices of the banking system across these
countries.

In an official statement published
Thursday, the ECB said unknown “unauthorized parties” had managed
to breach its Banks’ Integrated Reporting Dictionary (BIRD)
website, which was hosted by a third-party provider, eventually
forcing the bank to shut down the site.
^[1]

Launched in 2015, BIRD is a joint initiative of the Eurosystem to
the euro zone’s central banks and the banking system, which
provides banks with a precise description of the data that aims to
help reporting agents efficiently organize information stored in
their internal systems and fulfill their reporting requirements.

At the time of writing, the BIRD
website^[2] displays a page
informing visitors that the site is down for maintenance at the
moment and will be back online shortly. However, it doesn’t mention
anything about the security incident.

The BIRD website appears to have been hacked several months ago
on December 2018, according to a Reuters report, but the ECB
discovered the breach just late last week during regular
maintenance work.

Unknown hackers managed to install malware onto the external
server hosting the BIRD website to host software for phishing
attacks, which may have allowed them to walk away with the email
addresses, names and position titles of 481 subscribers of the
site.

The ECB assured its users that the stolen information does not
include their passwords and that “neither ECB internal systems nor
market-sensitive data were affected” in the breach since the BIRD
website is physically separate from other external and internal ECB
systems.

The ECB said that it “takes data security extremely seriously” and
have already informed the European Data Protection Supervisor about
the incident. It has also started contacting people whose data may
have been affected.

If you are one of those affected users, you are advised to
beware of phishing emails and follow standard security practices
while browsing online.

This is not the very first time when the European Central Bank
has been hit by a security breach.

The ECB suffered a data breach in 2014 as well, when hackers
managed to compromise its database serving its public website,
leading to the theft of email addresses, phone numbers and other
contact details of people registering for events at the ECB.

The attacks on banks have been increased in recent years, but
till now, the central bank of Bangladesh experienced the world’s biggest
cyberattack^[3] that took place in 2016
when cybercriminals successfully stole
$81 million^[4] from the country’s
central bank account at the New York Fed while attempting to
transfer $951
million^[5].