European weather services hit by storm of malicious email attacks

guest · Nov 6, 2020

European weather services hit by storm of malicious email attacks
November 6, 2020
https://www.newscientist.com/articl...ices-hit-by-storm-of-malicious-email-attacks/

Weather services across Europe have been caught in a storm of malicious email attacks in the past week, forcing groups to upgrade security measures and creating challenges for staff.

The Met Office and European Centre for Medium-Range Weather Forecasts (ECMWF) in the UK, Spain’s State Meteorological Agency and the Danish Meteorological Institute (DMI) are among the European services that were affected, New Scientist has confirmed.
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The widespread attacks came after the laptop of an individual in the meteorological community was infected by malware, leading the user’s mailbox to be acquired by a botnet, the ECMWF says. The botnet then used their email account to send messages with malware to contacts in the community. Email lists from several international meteorological organisations, which haven’t been named, were infected.

“Whilst this attack has created disruption, we can confirm that the attack has remained at email level and that our systems were not breached, and our operations were at no time jeopardised,” a spokesperson for the ECMWF says.
The Met Office confirmed that several members of staff had received malicious emails purporting “to be from a range of sources within the European Met community”.
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Mike Beck at UK cyber security firm Darktrace says meteorological groups are likely to be naturally vulnerable to such attacks because of their open and collaborative nature. “I’ve seen that before in academia, it’s much easier for attackers to spread,” he says.
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