Q25: Would the introduction of the digital euro make payments in Europe more vulnerable to cyberattacks?

The European Central Bank answers:
As with other digital infrastructures, the digital euro could be a target for cyberattacks. To mitigate this risk, the design of the digital euro would employ state-of-the-art technologies to create a cyber-resilient and future-proof environment. In the design of the cybersecurity controls, the ECB is making use of proven Eurosystem practices from other market infrastructures and regular planned testing against simulated attacks.
We answer them:

Clearly, “could be” is an understatement, we can be sure that it “will be”, given that the digital euro settlement system would offer a pan-European record of payment data. The promise of a “cyber-resilient (…) environment” lacks convincing support in published documents [1;2;3]: The ECB barely refers to buzzwords such as “secure development practices” and “reduction of the attack surface”, without providing further details [1]. At the same time, they do mention the usage of “sophisticated AI models” in the context of the digital euro, which opens a whole new class of attacks vectors.

The formulation of “state-of-the-art technologies” is particularly misleading, as it does not imply the application of the most modern or secure solution available, but merely “what everybody else does”. For example, Windows with CrowdStrike in the Cloud was considered state of the art for the Western airline industry as of summer 2024, rendering it severely vulnerable exactly because of the usage of CrowdStrike software which is designed to infiltrate all important parts of a system [4]. The current state of the art is everything, but not cyber-resilient or future-proof.

Furthermore, the state of the art is unclear in the context of transitively anonymous offline payments (KF2). As the ECB confirms in [1], there are no other large-scale payment solutions that currently support such offline payments, making the claim questionable.

  1. European Central Bank, Progress on the preparation phase of a digital euro: Closing progress report. Publications Office of the European Union, 2025. [Online]. Available: https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2866/3423337 [Accessed: Jan. 19, 2026].
  2. European Commission, Proposal for a regulation of the european parliament and of the council on the establishment of the digital euro, 2023. [Online]. Available: https://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/EN/TXT/?uri=CELEX:52023PC0369
  3. European Central Bank, A stocktake on the digital euro - summary report on the investigation phase and outlook on the next phase. https://www.ecb.europa.eu/euro/digital_euro/timeline/profuse/shared/pdf//ecb.dedocs231018.en.pdf, 2023.
  4. Wikipedia, 2024 CrowdStrike incident. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2024_CrowdStrike_incident, 2025.