EU Commission confirms AWS Europa breach; Internal systems intact

The European Commission on Friday confirmed a cyberattack in its Amazon Web Services environment that hosts parts of the Europa.eu web platform. The institution reports the incident has been contained and that internal systems were not affected. An investigation is underway.

A spokesperson indicated the attack hit a portion of the Commission’s cloud infrastructure. After detection, risk-reduction measures were applied and impact assessment continues. In an online notice, the Commission wrote the breach affected “its cloud infrastructure hosting the Commission’s web presence on the Europa.eu platform.”

People with knowledge of the incident indicated the intruder stole hundreds of gigabytes of data, including multiple databases, from the Commission’s AWS account. These individuals shared that the hacker provided screenshots as evidence of access. What kinds of data were taken has not been clarified.

Officials emphasized that internal systems were not touched, pointing to an incident limited to externally hosted web resources. No perpetrator has been named, no access method has been disclosed, and no timeline beyond discovery and containment has been provided.

Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier offered the following on Friday:

“We discovered a cyber-attack, which affected part of our cloud infrastructure. We have taken immediate steps and contained the attack. Risk mitigation measures were also implemented. The investigation is ongoing but we can already confirm that the Commission’s internal systems were not affected by the cyber-attack.”

The European Commission is the executive branch of the European Union. Europa.eu is the main online portal for information about EU institutions and policies and hosts many of the Commission’s webpages.