EU Cyber Security major outage incidents 2012 ENISA Report

The European Union Agency for Network and Information Security (ENISA) released its report that provides an overview of the process and an aggregated analysis of the 79 incident reports of severe outages of electronic communication networks or services which were reported by national regulators during 2012.
Below a summary of some of the conclusions that can be drawn from the ENISA  incident reports;

• 18 countries reported 79 significant incidents, 9 countries reported no significant incidents.
•  Most incidents affected mobile telephony or mobile Internet (about 50 % of the incidents respectively). Incidents affecting mobile telephony or mobile Internet also affected most users (around 1,8 million users per incident). This is consistent with the high penetration rate of mobile telephony and mobile Internet.
•  In 37 % of the incidents there was an impact on the emergency number 112.
•  For most incident reports the root cause was “System failures” (75 % of the incidents). This was the most common root cause category also for each of the four services (fixed and mobile telephony and fixed and mobile Internet). In the category “System failures”, hardware failures were the most common cause, followed by software bugs. The assets most often affected by system failures were switches (e.g. routers and local exchange points) and home location registers.
• Incidents categorized with root cause third party failures, mostly power supply failures, affected around 2.8 Million users on average. Incidents involving the detailed cause overload affected around 9.4 million users on average.
•  Incidents caused by natural phenomena (mainly storms and heavy snowfall) lasted the longest: around 36 hours on average.
• Incidents caused by overload followed by power failures respectively had most impact in terms of number of users affected times duration.
• Overall, switches and home location registers were the network components or assets most affected by incidents.

ENISA publishes an annual report, to provide industry and government bodies in the EU with data about the annual summary reporting. The next annual report will be published in summer 2014, covering incidents that occurred in 2013.