The European Union recently carried out its biggest exercise to prevent cyber-attacks on Europe’s public utilities and communications networks. The director of the European Network and Information Security Agency, Udo Helmbrecht, told The Associated Press that the one-day exercise involving 29 countries and 200 agencies dealt with attack scenarios against “critical infrastructure.” Helmbrecht said European countries were working to improve their coordination between national security agencies and to further standardize protective software and methods.
Examples of serious past incidents, he said, include a wave of cyber-attacks against Estonia in 2007 that severely affected the country’s banks and government agencies, and the Stuxnet computer virus that was used to target energy and industrial sites in Iran.
