third Cyber Security Assessment Netherlands - NCSC

Manifestations and incidents
At the moment the greatest threat for governments is aimed
at breaches to the confidentiality of information (particularly
espionage), the continuity of online services (including generic
services) and their own IT. This threat comes from a number
of sides: professional criminals, hacktivists and cyber vandals,
or script kiddies.
The most important threat for the business community concerns
espionage aimed at information sensitive to competition and
financial data abuse for the purpose of monetary theft. This also
happens with manipulation of (financial/bank) transactions. An
increasingly important threat in the past year is online disruption,
particularly for businesses providing vital online services.
Moreover, several different groups of actors are stealing all types
of business information for their own use, for publication or for
selling on to third parties. Examples include client data or information
on corporate IT provisions.
Citizens are affected by identity fraud and blackmail. Citizens become
involved when their data is stolen, published, sold, or misused.
When information is stolen directly from citizens, such interests
as money (damage through attacks on electronic banking), privacy,
availability of online services and digital identity are all affected.
Citizens are particularly concerned with the protection of their own
computers and electronic equipment against malware and ransom -
ware. They are affected indirectly when they are involved in a
cyber attack through their own IT (home computers), unwittingly
becoming part of a botnet.
The number of incidents handled by the NCSC increased enormously
during the investigation period. The main reason for this increase
is that on 5 January 2012 the NCSC began serving private parties
as well. For incidents involving the government, there has been
a relative increase in malware infections (+13 per cent) and hacking
attempts (+5 per cent).
The discovery of the previously undetected Pobelka botnet provided
insight into large numbers of infected computers and the quantity
of the leaked data. There are probably many more undetected
botnets. This demonstrates that the currently available measures
are inadequate to detect this type of attack.
Recently, basic provisions have been the target of attacks, including
attacks on iDeal, which make payments in web shops temporarily
impossible, and on DigiD, which meant government services
for which log-in is necessary became temporarily inaccessible. «
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