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In 2014, Half as Many Connections Affected by Incidents as in 2013
21.05.2015
According to the Report published today by ANCOM, 359 incidents with significant impact affected in 2014 the security and integrity of electronic communications networks and services, the total number of affected connections (8,836,821) being half of that reported in 2013 (19,897,831 connections). The most connections affected by incidents in 2014 were mobile telephony connections (approx. 4.4 million), followed by mobile internet ones (approx. 3 million), audio-visual programme retransmission (approx. 840 thousand), and fixed telephony services (approx. 440 thousand affected connections) and fixed internet (approx. 340 thousand affected connections, per service).
According to the data reported by the providers to ANCOM, last year, a security incident affected on average 24,615 connections, three times less than in 2013. The average duration of an incident was 4 hours, whereas the total duration of the incidents reported in 2014 is 1,420 hours.The most security incidents were registered in Bucharest, followed by the counties of Constanța, Dolj and Teleorman.
Almost 23% 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). Nevertheless, more than 77% were determined by external factors (power supply interruptions or accidental sectioning of the fibre optic, natural phenomena, cable theft etc.). A total of 45% of the incidents resulted from power supply failures. Most incidents (55 out of the 359 incidents) were reported in June 2014, most of which were generated by power supply failures.
96% of the reported incidents had the potential of preventing or disturbing emergency calls to 112, given that the majority of the 2014 incidents concerned mobile telephone services. The users were yet able to call the single emergency number where the area from which they initiated the respective call was covered by other mobile telephony provider/s or by other base stations of the same network, which were not affected by the incident.
The ANCOM Report on the incidents that affected the security and integrity of electronic communications networks and services in 2014 (available in Romanian only) was drawn up based on the information reported by the electronic communications providers for 2014, this being the second year when the Authority collects the respective data, following the entry into force of Decision no. 512/2013, which imposed on the providers the obligation to notify ANCOM on incidents 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.
”Incident reporting enables ANCOM to monitor the level of security of the electronic communications networks and services, while the statistical analysis of the incidents allows it to assess the security level, identify the providers’ actions with a view to remedying and preventing incidents, and to detect best practices based on the lessons learnt in the incident management process” declared Eduard Lovin, ANCOM Executive Director.
In order to ensure the quality of the repoorting process and to clarify certain technical details of the procedure for identifying and reporting security incidents, ANCOM elaborated and published in Romanian the Guidelines on reporting incidents that affect the security and integrity of the public electronic communications networks and publicly available electronic communications services.
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