More and more hacker attacks : "The force is worrying"

New figures show how hacker attacks are affecting the German economy. The amount of damage has jumped due to Corona - and the nature of the attacks has changed.

Computer hackers have increasingly targeted the German economy. Since the beginning of the Corona crisis, for example, not only has the number of attacks by cybercriminals on local companies, research institutes, associations and institutions increased significantly. The total amount of damage has also increased by leaps and bounds. At 223 billion euros a year, it is currently more than twice as high as in 2018 and 2019.

Nearly 90 percent of the one thousand companies and organizations surveyed in a representative poll conducted by the Berlin-based digital association Bitkom said they had been hit by attacks from the Internet - worse than ever before. In the two years before the Corona crisis, "only" 75 percent of companies saw themselves in the crosshairs of cybercriminals. At the time, the damage was estimated at around 100 billion euros.

With the outbreak of the pandemic, new record figures were reached month after month. No wonder: with Corona, hundreds of thousands of large and small companies switched to having the majority of their employees work from home. New technology was needed for working from home: laptops, software, networks. But how to use them was seldom tried and tested, and hardly practiced at all. Many of the new systems were also riddled with security gaps.

Stolen, hijacked and encrypted

This spurred hackers to step up their activities. While data espionage was on the agenda before the crisis, the outbreak of Corona brought blackmail programs to the fore. This so-called ransomware is placed on company computers via infected e-mails, updates or websites, where it hijacks important data and encrypts it so that companies lose control of their IT systems and can no longer operate them.

In exchange for paying a ransom, the companies receive a digital key that allows them to get their data back. On average, between 70,000 and 80,000 euros must be paid for such a key. "The force with which ransomware attacks are shaking our economy is worrying and affects companies of all sectors and sizes," says Bitkom President Achim Berg, commenting on the current development.

Everything that can be found in the storage systems of computers and network computers is stolen, hijacked and encrypted: Customer and operational data, production and accounting software, development plans, research work and patent developments. "Theft of intellectual property can have serious consequences for the innovation-driven German economy," Berg continues.

"Those who fail to do so are behaving negligently."

Sinan Selen, vice president of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution, who presented the results together with Berg, said, "The current Bitkom study makes it clear how important a resilient economy is for Germany as a business location. The Corona pandemic has drastically reinforced the need. Only through intensive cooperation between industry and the authorities can we effectively counter the threats of sabotage and espionage."

Hackers primarily exploit the "human factor" as the weakest link in the security chain to penetrate foreign systems on their way to their targets. Forty-one percent of the companies surveyed had recently experienced such attempts. 27 percent of those surveyed stated that they had been contacted by telephone, among other things, and 24 percent had received infected e-mails. This is probably mainly due to the changed working conditions in the wake of the Corona pandemic.

Fifty-nine percent of companies that allow home offices said there have been IT security incidents since the pandemic began that resulted from employees working from home. In half of those cases, the hackers succeeded. Berg said, "Simply sending employees home to work is not enough. Their devices need to be secured, channels protected and the workforce made aware of threats. "Anyone who doesn't do that is behaving negligently."