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The European Union Agency for Cybersecurity (ENISA) has signed a Working Arrangement with the United States’ federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA). This follows a Joint Statement of European Commissioner Thierry Breton and US Secretary for Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, in January.
Cooperation inclues the International Cybersecurity Challenge (ICC), exchanging best practices in the area of incident reporting or ad hoc information exchanges on basic cyber threats.
Collaboration remains key, CISA Director Jen Easterly said.ย โCISAโs Working Arrangement with ENISA signifies a new chapter in our collective resilience. Together we will enhance cybersecurity awareness, fortify capacity building initiatives, and foster a robust environment for knowledge sharing and best practice exchanges, ensuring a safer digital landscape for our citizens.โ
Cooperation will be sought in:
– Cyber Awareness & Capacity Building for cyber resilience: including the participation as third country representatives in specific EU-wide cyber security exercises or trainings and the sharing and promotion of cyber awareness tools;
– Best practice exchange in the implementation of cyber legislation; including on the EU’s NIS Directive, incident reporting, vulnerabilities management and the approach to sectors such as telecommunications and energy; and
– Knowledge and information sharing to aid common situational awareness: including a more systematic sharing of knowledge and information in relation to the cybersecurity threat landscape to increase the common situational awareness to the stakeholders and in data protection.
Meanwhile ENISA in a report on Denial-of-Service (DoS) attacks finds 66pc of DoS attacks are politically motivated. Some 310 verified DoS incidents from January 2022 to August 2023 are covered; only incidents gathered from open sources. DoS attacks have increased in number especially in the public administration and have become easier and more aggressive than before, largely due to geopolitical reasons, according to the report. The DoS threat landscape is greatly influenced by the emergence of the recent armed conflicts; especially the Russia-Ukraine War that fuelled new waves of DoS attacks where recently introduced threat actors select targets without the fear of repercussions. Some 8pc of the attacks caused total disruptionย in the target.
ENISA last month formalised a Working Arrangement with Ukraine counterparts on capacity-building, best practices exchange and boosting situational awareness.
Definitions
Denial-of-service attacks (DoS) are defined in the report as availability attacks in which attackers, partially or totally, obstruct the legitimate use of a target’s service by depleting or exploiting the target’s assets over a period of time.
A Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) attack DDoS is a subset of DoS attacks. DoS attacks can be distributed which means that they may originate from thousands of sources, usually relying on large-scale botnets or proxies.
