‼️🇪🇺 BREAKING: Europol ran a shadow IT system stuffed with more than 2 petabytes of sensitive data on people who were never even suspected of a crime, and part of the data was kept outside of formal oversight... This lands as the European Commission prepares to expand Europol's mandate and double its budget. "They protect the law while breaking it," according to a former Europol senior official. A joint investigation by Solomon, Correctiv, and Computer Weekly uncovered that Europol operated for years outside its own legal limits, with no functioning audit logs, no access controls, and admin rights handed out by the dozen. They call the system the Computer Forensic Network, or CFN. Built in 2012 to triage forensic data, it became Europol's primary analytical platform. By 2019, the CFN held at least 2 petabytes of operational data, roughly 420 times the size of Europol's official non-forensic database. Drewer, the data protection officer, found that 99% of Europol's data sat in the CFN, processed without basic data protection or security safeguards. The 2019 internal security assessment listed 32 separate failures. Among them: - Ineffective assignment of security roles - Insufficient management of privileged access rights - Unrestricted software installation - Lack of password management - Lack of administrative usage logs - Insufficient event logging and monitoring - Insufficient network access control Independent experts who reviewed the findings called the volume of admin accounts a textbook breach of confidentiality and an open door for both rogue insiders and external attackers. Logs could be modified or deleted by anyone with admin rights, meaning data tampering and unauthorised access could not be reliably traced. Then there is the Pressure Cooker. A separate clandestine environment run by Europol's Internet Referral Unit, used to pull open-source data without ICT involvement and outside formal oversight. Internal staff flagged it as an "irregular situation" in October 2022. The EU's privacy watchdog, the EDPS, says it was never told about it during the original 2019 investigation. After almost a decade of negotiation, the EDPS closed its monitoring of the CFN in February 2026. 15 of 150 recommendations remained unimplemented, including ones the watchdog flagged as concerning "issues of particular importance," covering core security safeguards.
