Description

The government of Luxembourg launched a formal investigation into an extensive 23 July telecoms blackout following a claimed cyberattack, which is said to have been aimed at Huawei equipment. The assault brought the country's 4G and 5G mobile network down for over three hours, cutting swathes of the public off from emergency services, the internet, and electronic banking. The 2G back-up network was quickly overwhelmed, revealing underpinning vulnerabilities in the country's telecoms infrastructure. Government officials reported the cyberattack to look like a deliberate disturbance instead of an accidental malfunction following an attempted hacking. The assailants exploited an imperfection in a standardized software module used by POST Luxembourg, a government-owned telecommunications company. The national alert system of Luxembourg also fell apart during the attack since it depended on POST's open mobile network. Although the authorities did not finger Huawei, local magazine Paperjam reported that the malware-infected software was traced to Huawei routers, prompting regulators to invite organizations that are using Huawei equipment to contact the national cybersecurity team (CSIRT). POST director-general described the attack as exceptionally advanced and sophisticated, but said no customer information and internal infrastructure were affected. POST and the CSIRT are carrying out a complete forensic analysis, and the public prosecutor will determine if a crime has been committed and if the criminals can be identified and prosecuted. The incident has prompted Luxembourg to move ahead with its ongoing consideration of national resilience and priority infrastructure. Officials are reassessing emergency stand-by systems and debating regulatory reform to allow mobile phones to tap other operators' networks in the case of a failure, something already in place in countries like the UK, Germany, and the US.