The leading electronics retail chains in Germany have been badly hit by a hacker attack.

The stores of Media Markt and Saturn with more than a dozen national organizations and hundreds of stores across Europe were the target of a cyber attack on Monday night, in which the attackers apparently managed to penetrate into the core IT areas of the retail chains in order to be there To cause damage by deliberately freezing data and thus rendering it unusable for the time being.

Stephan Finsterbusch

Editor in business.

  • Follow I follow

The companies belonging to the Düsseldorf-based Ceconomy Holding immediately informed the responsible authorities and are now working flat out to identify the systems affected by the hacks, to evaluate the damage and, if necessary, to remedy it.

But that can take time.

Because at least some of the systems are currently no longer working due to massive amounts of frozen data.

Numerous services such as financing or guarantees can currently only be processed to a limited extent in the branches and shops.

A spokesman was quoted as saying that there is currently no need for customers to act.

The online shops are also currently not affected by the attack.

Every second large company is helpless

The attack on the markets is part of a long series of attacks on companies, organizations and government institutions around the world. These include, for example, the German Software AG, Microsoft, pipeline operators and the American government. Since the outbreak of the Corona crisis, they have seen their computers and IT systems increasingly attacked and hijacked by hackers. The attackers actually take the data on the affected computers hostage with special software and demand a ransom for their release - often in the form of cryptocurrencies. The sums can go into the millions of euros.

Tracking down the hackers is not easy. The problem seems to overwhelm many companies in view of the complexity of their technical systems. Every second large company in the world is virtually helpless in the face of sophisticated cyber attacks, according to a study by the IT consultancy Accenture. 55 percent of global corporations are currently unable to recognize such attacks, take effective action against them and quickly limit their potential consequences.

The reasons: Hardly anyone still has full, let alone comprehensive, insight into the computer systems that have grown over the years; Nor can one say from which dark corner of the Internet the next attack will come. Media Markt and Saturn are evidently the same way. So far, the investigation has been in the dark. Even a company like Microsoft needed several weeks at the beginning of the year to shed light behind the scenes of a major attack on its systems.

Against the background of the number of attacks that have been growing for months, 80 percent of all large companies in the world have increased their cyber security budgets in the past few months. But the wave of attacks rolls on almost unchecked. The protection of their IT systems has meanwhile become so expensive that the majority of the almost 4800 companies surveyed in the Accenture study stated that the funds to be used could not be made available on a sustainable basis. In other words, cybersecurity costs billions.

The relocation of work to the home office during the Corona crisis opened up weak flanks for attackers in many systems. These took advantage of this abundantly. In August, the Berlin industry association Bitkom estimated the damage caused by cyber attacks to the German economy alone at 220 billion euros per year. That is more than twice as much as in the years before the outbreak of the corona pandemic. Since last year, nine out of ten companies have been hit by hacker attacks. Before Corona, only three quarters of all companies were registered as victims. The association had a representative study carried out for which more than a thousand companies from a wide range of industries were surveyed. So now Media Markt and Saturn have also been hit.The IT specialists from both companies will have their hands full in the coming weeks.