The European Central Bank (ECB) is in Germany and is the most significant bank of the European Union. In a statement published on Thursday, the officials confirmed that unknown “unauthorized parties” had breached its Banks’ Integrated Reporting Dictionary (BIRD) forcing the bank to shut down the website.
What is BIRD and How Important is it?
BIRD is a conjoined initiative of the parties of the Eurosystem whose main job was to, provide banks with a unique and concise description of the data gathered in order to assist marketers effectively prepare records and graphs for storage use and research purpose. The main website of BIRD displayed information that due to increasing traffic the site was taken down indefinitely for security reasons. However, it didn’t give any details about why it happened and the cause. Several months ago on December 2018, according to Reuters, a hacking attempt to get access to the servers took place but the ECB dismissed them as not important. Hackers loaded malware onto the outside server hosting the BIRD website to corrupt the software to propagate phishing attacks and during this process, they got away with a ton of data relating to email addresses, names and position titles of 481 subscribers of the site. The ECB, however, issued an assurance to its customers that the stolen facts do not consist of the passwords and that they will be operational very soon. The attacks on banks are on the rise since the past few years with banks in countries like Bangladesh suffering hefty loses due to cybercriminals. The ECB has opined to handle this matter securely and fast so they can be back on track without giving any tension to its customers.
