Telekom Romania to pay hefty fine for security incident in March

Telekom Romania Mobile Communications, one of German group Deutsche Telekom’stwolocal subsidiaries, will have to pay two fines worth a combined RON 1.1 million (EUR 237,000) for a security incident in March this year. “This was the most serious incident recorded on the Romanian electronic communications market, so we applied two fines worth RON 1.1 million to this supplier,” said Sorin Grindeanu, the head of the local telecom regulator ANCOM. On March 5, Telekom Romania’s mobile network crashed for several hours affecting many of the company’s users. Telekom Romania had about 4.7 million mobile clients at the end of March this year. According to ANCOM, the security incident caused serious breaches of the service availability conditions. Local mobile carriers must make sure that network crashes registered over a period of six months are not longer than 35 minutes. The operators must also keep network logs for a period of six months to be able to prove that they respect network availability conditions, but Telekom couldn’t do this either. According to ANCOM, incidents that affect more than 5,000 connections for over 60 minutes are events with significant impact that can affect or threaten the security and integrity of communications networks and services at a national and European level. Telekom Romania compensates clients after network crash editor@romania-insider.com