Cybersecurity threats in Catalunya: A significant increase in 2024
In 2024, Catalunya faced a notable surge in cyberattacks, with over 3,000 cybersecurity incidents affecting public administrations, representing a 26% rise from the previous year. The Catalan Cybersecurity Agency (Agència de Ciberseguretat) dealt with a total of 3,372 cyber incidents, which are events that have a direct impact on an organization, as explained by the agency’s director, Laura Caballero. In addition, more than 6.9 billion attempted cyberattacks targeted various entities, including public administration systems, government departments, healthcare centers, and universities, though most of these attacks were thwarted.
Despite the increase in incidents, Caballero emphasized that the majority were of a minor nature. This improvement is attributed to enhanced prevention measures, which have effectively reduced the risk of severe cybersecurity incidents. Additionally, the increase can be partly attributed to the agency's proactive efforts in detecting attacks in their early stages, along with the implementation of a new email filtering system to block malicious messages targeting government inboxes. Caballero also referenced the previous data breach at the Hospital Clínic de Barcelona, which had led to improved defenses against similar high-severity attacks.
The most common types of cyber incidents included the exposure of credentials on public platforms or data leaks (2,257 cases), unauthorized access to personal or corporate accounts (724 cases), identity theft for fraudulent emails (117 cases), and the distribution and execution of malicious software (102 cases).
The higher education sector was the most affected, with 1,790 incidents reported. This year also marked the completion of the deployment of cybersecurity services across the eight universities in Catalunya, which, along with the Consortium of University Services of Catalunya (CSUC), aims to bolster resilience against future cyber threats.
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