DGermany is under constant digital fire. The federal government in Berlin, Frankfurt financial institutions, Munich armaments companies, the taxpayers’ association, energy suppliers and humanitarian aid organizations – they all have to defend themselves against cyber attacks. Hackers have just switched off the websites of German airports using relatively simple methods. Their attacks are well camouflaged, but looking for the perpetrators they look towards Russia.
Several cyber security experts interviewed by the FAZ and a new analysis by the internet company Google report on a new type of digital warfare and see a “politicization of the attacks”. Germany is one of the countries that is increasingly being targeted by hacker groups based in Russia. The main target is Ukraine, where, according to Google, cyber attacks have increased by leaps and bounds since last autumn and where the Ministry of Defense in particular was attacked.
The vice president of the Federal Intelligence Service (BND) had already warned at the HPI security conference in Potsdam last summer: “Russia is in our networks. China is in our networks.” Now, in their X-Force security report, the security experts at IBM explain that Russia is massively upgrading the digital front. And Google describes in its new analysis “Fog of War” how Moscow is pulling out all the stops, recruiting private hacker gangs and harnessing them to the carts of the GRU military intelligence service.
IT security companies such as the German companies Link11 or Avira and US technology groups also repeatedly report masses of Russian cyber attacks. “We are currently seeing a kind of politicization of the attacks,” says Marc Korthaus from the Berlin security company Sys11. With the German government’s decision to supply battle tanks to Ukraine, the number of attacks on German targets increased by leaps and bounds. “But these weren’t sophisticated and particularly sophisticated attacks,” he explains. “And that worries us. Because these attacks are little more than a warning signal – and we have to take that seriously. We should therefore take a close look at what happened in the networks there before the actual attack on Ukraine.” Because relatively simple attacks – as recently in Germany – were followed by technically smart attacks.
Alexander Vuckevic, Director of Protection Labs at IT security firm Avira, says: Every time Europe tightened sanctions against Russia or stepped up aid to Ukraine, hackers massed their attacks. The Bundestag voted for tank deliveries – a wave of attacks went through German IT systems. At the security conference in Munich, Moscow’s invasion was pilloried – hackers attacked NATO’s IT systems. Bulgaria joined Ukraine as Russian Killnet group attacked government computers in Sofia.
Christian Dörr, Professor of Cybersecurity at the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI) in Potsdam, says: “Cyber wars exist.” It just turns out differently than expected. Among other things, the Russians had learned lessons from their “Viasat hack”. A year ago, hackers attacked the communication satellites used by the US operator Viasat in Ukraine – and also hit data connections from German wind turbines. In 2017, the Russians caused heavy collateral damage with the Not-Petya Trojan attack. The malware first infected Ukrainian banks, but then spread uncontrollably in the global data networks – and in this way also reached the computers of corporations such as Beiersdorf and Maersk.
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