Dutch football association says data breach won't impact scheduled football events

The Royal Dutch Football Association has suffered a cyber attack that has compromised the sensitive personal information of its employees.

Headquartered in Zeist, the Royal Dutch Football Association or KNVB, which serves as the governing body for football in the Netherlands, has around 1.2 million members and runs the main football leagues of the country, the KNVB Cup, and the Dutch men’s and women’s national teams.

In a recent statement, the KNVB management said the “ICT network on the KNVB Campus” was recently targeted with a cyber attack. The organisation has launched an investigation to understand the nature and scope of the security incident.

The management said that though certain personal information of KNVB employees were accessed by threat actors, the security incident will not impact scheduled footballing events.

“Earlier it became clear that primary business operations will not be jeopardized and that e-mail systems, for example, have remained unaffected. So football will continue as planned. But it is now also clear that the cybercriminals have illegally obtained personal data from KNVB employees,” the KNVB management said.

The management also said that the security incident has been reported to the Dutch Data Protection Authority. It is not clear how the threat actors infiltrated KNVB’s network, what kind of data was compromised, or how many KNVB employees were affected by the security incident. The football association said that the investigation is still ongoing and more updates will be shared in the future.

“More and more organisations are confronted with cybercrime. Despite our security system, the KNVB has now also fallen victim to this. We are particularly sorry that our employees may have to deal with this. Unfortunately, we don’t have better news at the moment. We are doing everything we can to limit the problems,” KNVB management added.

Earlier this month, The Dutch national railway, Nederlandse Spoorwegen (NS), said the sensitive personal information of around 780,000 customers was compromised as a result of a major breach suffered by a third-party market research firm, Blauw. Dutch telecom provider VodafoneZiggo also reported a data breach that compromised the sensitive personal information of around 700,000 customers following a security incident at Blauw.