Cyber Threats Around Us
Every day, millions of cyber attacks are launched in the world
Corina Cristea, 17.10.2025, 13:52
Every day, millions of cyber attacks are launched in the world. They target large companies, but also ordinary people, so what once seemed like a problem only for IT professionals, today has come to concern us all. Romania is no exception – the level of cyber threats remains high, and the year 2024 brought an intensification of risks to the national civilian cyberspace, experts in the field say. The annual report of the National Directorate of Cyber Security reveals that over 27 million relevant events were detected by sensors installed or configured by the institution, most of which were attempts to infiltrate infrastructures or scans aimed at collecting information. Dan Cîmpean, director of the National Directorate of Cyber Security (track): “In cyberspace, in virtual space, obviously, a wide variety of activities are taking place. Some malicious, those that we face every day, permanently, as simple users or as institutions, but also, obviously, a lot of events, operations that are legitimate, are of a nature to improve cyber security. Let me give you some examples of events that we at the Directorate detect or that are reported to us. They are, first and foremost, scans for vulnerabilities, then attempts to take unauthorized control of user accounts, over IT infrastructures. Also, smaller or less sophisticated attacks on these infrastructure elements. Anything, from websites to social media accounts of users or organizations or other categories of infrastructure. So, a very wide variety from a technical point of view and, what can I say, these are carried out on a permanent basis. So, they are carried out very much in an automated manner and, unfortunately, since artificial intelligence has intervened and greatly improved our lives and activities, unfortunately, however, the same artificial intelligence is also used by malicious actors to improve their attack methods. So, we are faced with a lot of scans, with a lot of attempts to corrupt and crack passwords, to take over some infrastructure elements. From laptops, servers, tablets, websites, to very complex infrastructures.”
A simple wrong click can open the door to a cyber attack. Most attacks are not sophisticated, say specialists in the field, but they take advantage of people’s inattention. A fake link, a weak password or an application downloaded from an insecure source can compromise a system. And many users, including some institutions, still do not have modern protection measures implemented. In Romania, phishing or ransomware attacks are among the most common. Hackers use seemingly legitimate emails to trick users into providing passwords or banking information. Other times, they encrypt a computer’s data and demand money to unlock it. It’s happening everywhere. But cyber threats aren’t just about money. In recent years, attacks on critical infrastructure, such as hospitals and energy grids, have become national security issues. At the same time, cyber threats are also found in Russia’s hybrid warfare in the context of its confrontation with Ukraine.
Again, Dan Cîmpean:
“It is a reality that attempts to compromise the confidentiality, integrity, availability of data, which are the cyber domain, the domain in which the Directorate operates, overlap greatly with the disinformation campaign, the propagation of fake news, for a very simple reason: many attack vectors are identical, they are common. And let me give you a very simple example, which we, at the Directorate, have observed for many years, not just since 2019: any or almost any significant event, political, social, sporting, is immediately followed or preceded by cyber attacks. Often, attackers use what is happening in the real world or in virtual space, the news, these events, to launch malicious messages, messages that guide us, as simple users, to malicious sites, from where we can be contaminated with viruses, malware or where, obviously illegally, our user data is captured. So there is a very interesting and very sophisticated overlap of these areas, so in general we can say very, very clearly – we are facing a hybrid phenomenon, in which purely cyber operations, but also disinformation, influence and so on, overlap and are, in many cases, executed by the same actors.”
How can we protect ourselves from all these types of attacks? Specialists say that prevention is the key. The first measures are related to the use of complex passwords, two-step authentication and constant updating of systems. But, above all, digital education matters, so that each new generation becomes more aware, not more vulnerable.
