The European Parliament has resumed normal e-mail service following a suspected cyber attack.
An attack on the Parliament's systems is thought to have begun on March 24, two days after the European Commission and the European Union's External Action Service detected a sustained and targeted cyber attack on their own systems.
However, the attack on the Parliament was not in the same league as that on the Commission, a Parliament spokesman said Friday.
"Following the attack on the Commission, our IT services started looking very hard at our own system. They noticed that there were abnormal levels of webmail activity, particularly overnight, when we wouldn't expect such activity," he said.
As a precaution webmail and some other external services were shut down and staff were told on Monday to change their passwords while an investigation was carried out. "The results of that investigation show that nothing was compromised," said the spokesman. "The scale of the actual hacking problem was not dissimilar to that faced by any large organization. The high levels of activity we were seeing were due to the way in which some mobile devices connect to our webmail."
The Parliament's IT services are still monitoring the situation. The Parliament and the Commission run on totally separate networks and it seems unlikely that the two attacks were linked given the differences in scale and focus. There is still concern that professional, systematic hackers with a clear agenda are behind the Commission attack but this is not the case in the Parliament.
A separate e-mail problem in Parliament on Wednesday brought the e-mail system to a halt for three hours. The spokesman said that this was nothing to do with any attack and was simply a glitch that has now been fixed.
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