European Commission confirms cyberattack after hackers claim data breach 

The European Union’s top executive body has confirmed a cyberattack after hackers reportedly stole reams of data from its cloud storage.

European Commission spokesperson Thomas Regnier told TechCrunch on Friday that the Commission “discovered a cyber-attack, which affected part of our cloud infrastructure.”

“We have taken immediate steps and contained the attack. Risk mitigation measures were also implemented. The investigation is ongoing but we can already confirm that the Commission’s internal systems were not affected by the cyber-attack,” the spokesperson said.

In a longer statement on its website, the Commission said the breach “affected its cloud infrastructure hosting the Commission’s web presence on the Europa.eu platform,” which hosts much of the Commission’s website data. 

Bleeping Computer first reported news of the breach on Friday, citing sources with knowledge of the incident. The publication said hackers had stolen hundreds of gigabytes of data, including multiple databases, from the European Commission’s account on cloud giant Amazon Web Services. The hacker provided the publication evidence of their access, including screenshots.

It’s not immediately clear what kinds of data was stolen.