Since the start of the Ukrainian war, Germany’s government and armed forces have seen a serious increase in cyber attacks coming from Russia, which have even affected the lower house of parliament, the Bundestag. But these computer attacks also affect private sector companies of geostrategic importance, which, unlike public entities, hide the extent of the attacks, as long as they do not affect their clients, so as not to damage their image. The magnitude of the threat is such, however, that the Schwarz Group, owner of the Lidl and Karfland supermarket chains, has decided to make the data public. According to its CEO, Gerd Chrzanowski, they are receiving an average of 350,000 cyber attacks daily, which forces the company to make a great effort and security funding on this side.
«Before the war in Ukraine, we, as a Schwarz group, received about 3,500 attacks a day. Now we are attacked 350,000 times a day, especially from Russia,” Chrzanowski declared in an interview with Süddeutsche Zeitung, “but the solution is on the way.” The group is developing AI solutions to defend against this type of intervention in its systems, together with the American company ServiceNow. The software you are developing will also be made available to all other companies that want to use it, including retail competitors. «We compete in eggs, bananas and milk, but not in cybersecurity. We have to work on that together. If one of us is attacked, it affects all of us,” explains Chrzanowski.
As was demonstrated during the pandemicthe supply and distribution of food and essential products acquires a geostrategic character in situations of crisis or conflict. Every time one of these cyberattacks manages to enter the systems of supermarket chains, it endangers the flow of food and places, especially large cities, in a situation of high vulnerability. Those responsible for the sector have high hopes for a new “digital sovereignty.” “There are data that should not reach a server in another country,” says the director of the Schwarz Group, for which a data infrastructure is required that does not yet exist within the EU. More AI solutions for retail are in the works across Europe. «We are currently developing a new artificial intelligence platform together with ServiceNow, which is already working in 80 Lidl stores as a pilot project and which will be implemented in the near future across the group’s entire supermarket network and which we want to offer to all retailers. of Europe in 2025,” promises Chrzanowski.
By 2025, when Schwarz plans to share its new cybersecurity tool, 41 billion devices will be connected to the Internet around the world. The new Cybersecurity Strategy, which the European Commission and the European External Action Service (EEAS) presented in December 2020, with the objective of “strengthening resilience in Europe against cyber threats and ensuring that all citizens and companies can benefit full of secure and reliable digital services and tools”, has so far mainly targeted the transport, energy, healthcare and finance sectors. Small and medium-sized businesses, on the other hand, are visibly lagging behind, even though they are currently the most affected sector. With 49% of cyberattacks, small and medium-sized retailers are the most affected in Europe, above the United States, with 42%, according to the latest study by Akamai Technologies. Germany ranks first with more than 3.1 billion cybercriminal attacks through web applications, bots, phishing and the use of third-party scripts. Especially LFI attacks, which can lead to remote code execution and network access, as well as deep security breaches such as ransomware attacks, is currently considered the biggest threat.
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