Europe ‘not prepared for cyberattacks’

A lack of action and agreement on many aspects of cybersecurity is undermining Europe’s ability to deal with attacks on computing infrastructure, politicians have said.

“The EU is not ready to deal with a large-scale cyber attack,” the Dutch MEP Marietje Schaake told a conference in Brussels on 27 June. National governments are reluctant to work together and have not agreed how they themselves should behave online, she said at an event organised by media website Science Business. She added that governments often blur the boundaries between intelligence gathering and security.

Evidence of this lack of readiness has been abundant recently, with the Wannacry ransom attack in May having affected public service providers and companies across Europe. A similar attack affected companies in Russia and the Ukraine this week.