Press Releases

253 Incidents Affected the Security and Integrity of Romanian Electronic Communications Networks for Minimum One Hour in 2013

21.07.2014

According to the report published by ANCOM today, 253 incidents with significant impact affected the security and integrity of the Romanian electronic communications networks and services in 2013. The majority of the connections affected by these incidents were mobile telephony connections (about 10 million), followed by mobile Internet (more than 7.5 million connections), fixed telephony (over 2.3 million), fixed Internet and audiovisual programme retransmission (less than 1 million).
According to the data reported to ANCOM by the providers, an incident with significant impact affected on average approx. 80,000 connections, and 80% of the incidents were discovered as they occured. An incident lasted on average 5 hours, whereas the total duration of the incidents reported for 2013 amounts to 1,218 hours. 
Almost 40% of the incidents were trigerred by internal causes of the communications providers (software or hardware failures, human errors generated by the faulty configuration and operation of the equipment). More than 60% were however determined by external factors (power supply interruptions or accidental sectioning of the fibre optic, natural phenomena, cable theft etc.). Although the system errors and third parties’ actions were responsible for most of the incidents reported for 2013 (75%), the incidents which required the longest restoring period were caused by natural phenomena and malicious actions.
89% of the reported incidents had the potential of preventing or disturbing the emergency calls to 112, given that the majority of the 2013 incidents concerned the mobile telephone services. The users were yet able to call the single emergency number as their calls were taken over by other base stations of the network, which were not affected by the incident, or by another mobile telephony provider who had coverage in that area, and therefore no problems were registered in this field.
The ANCOM Report (available in Romanian only) was drawn up based on the information reported by the providers for 2013, following the entry into force of Decision no. 512/2013, which imposed on the providers the obligation to notify ANCOM on the existence of an incident with significant impact on the security and integrity of the electronic communications networks and services, namely those incidents which affect more than 5,000 connections for at least one hour. The ANCOM decision was adopted following the reports drawn by the Authority in 2012 and 2013 based on market surveys, which indicated the need for putting in place a national procedure for the reporting of the incidents with significant impact.
In order to ensure the quality of the repoorting process and clarify certain technical details of the procedure for identifying and reporting the security incidents, ANCOM will elaborate this year some guidelines on the reporting of the security incidents which affect the security and integrity of the public electronic communications networks and publicly available electronic communications services.
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