State of cybersecurity in Germany in 2021

According to the German Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), the country faces a serious and growing threat as society becomes more digitally connected and criminals more sophisticated. The BSI said threat levels have reached red alarm levels.

The threat level has increased

BSI has published its annual report “The state of IT security in Germany in 2021. He points out that the greatest risks come from malware and ransomware attacks. In fact, the agency detected 144 million new malware variants between June 2020 and the end of May 2021, an increase of 22% for the period. ‘year. In February 2021, BSI detected 553,000 malware variants in a single day, a new record. “In 2020 to” stretched to criticism “.

The reason for this heightened alert level is the increasing professionalism of cybercriminals combined with the network composition of society.

“The significant increase in remote working has led to a substantial growth in the attack surface in terms of interconnect services and the hardware delivered and used. This trend has therefore facilitated the possible exploitation of security vulnerabilities for cybercrime campaigns ”, noted one joint report by the French ANSSI and the German BSI.

The growing trend in cybercrime has been fueled by the coronavirus pandemic as more business and government employees work remotely. The report makes it clear that cyber attacks have not only become more frequent, but have also become more costly. Bitkom, an association of the computer industry, estimated that losses due to blackmail and system failures have increased by 358% since 2019.

Criminals don’t just work for themselves, according to the BSI. They also sell their services on the darknet. They have become more sophisticated in their approach along the way, using multi-layered attack strategies previously seen in cases of state espionage. For example, the BSI noted a method in which malicious actors negotiate a ransom from a victim and seek data in return.

The use of so-called “leaked pages” was an example of attackers posting stolen data to extort victims to pay a ransom. The agency illustrated the blackmail approach by citing the case of a private psychologist’s practice that was hacked into which criminals pressured not only the owner of the practice, but also their patients.

The threat to critical infrastructure

According to BSI, “The attacks hit areas fundamental to our society, such as energy and health infrastructure. The BSI report went on to observe that “information security must be given considerably greater importance and become the basis of all digitization projects”.

The same concerns are raised in the joint ANSSI and BSI report. Both agencies wrote that digitizing the production processes that underpin an entity’s core business through the connection of operational technology (TO) will come with risks in the near future. These OT systems generally have a long life cycle and are expensive. They are neither modified nor updated regularly. Therefore, most of today’s OT systems were installed at a time when IT security was not recognized as a vital factor in the functioning of OT systems.

Another Europol report, Internet Organized Crime Threat Assessment (IOCTA) 2020, noted that ransomware poses a significant indirect threat to businesses and organizations in Europe, including critical infrastructure, by targeting supply chains and third-party service providers.

In addition to ransomware, the European law enforcement agency has reported that malware in the broad sense is widely present in cybercrime cases. Criminals have converted some traditional banking Trojans into more advanced modular malware to cover a wider range of functionality. These evolved forms of modular malware pose a major threat in the EU, especially as their adaptive and scalable nature makes them increasingly difficult to combat effectively.

Germany adopts cybersecurity strategy

In response to the increased threat of advanced cyber attacks, the Federal GoThe German government has adopted the cybersecurity strategy for Germany 2021. The strategy includes four main guidelines:

• Establish cybersecurity as a joint task of state, business, society and science.
• Strengthen the digital sovereignty of the State, businesses, science and society.
• Ensure the secure development of digitization.
• Make goals measurable and transparent.

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For German speakers you can get a translated version here: https://www.tripwire.com/leitfaden-zur-sicherheitskonfigurationsmanagement.

Read this blog in German

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