Theft of IT equipment and data, espionage and sabotage cause damage to the German economy estimated at 203 billion euros.

This is the result of a study by the digital association Bitkom, which surveyed more than 1000 companies in a representative survey.

The estimated damage is therefore slightly below the record year 2021 with 223 billion euros.

In 2018 and 2019, however, the sum was still 103 billion euros.

Stephen Finsterbusch

Editor in Business.

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Maximilian Sachsen

Editor in Business

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According to Bitkom, nine out of ten companies were hit by attacks last year.

The proportion of Russian and Chinese attacks has increased by leaps and bounds.

43 percent of the affected companies registered at least one attack from China.

Last year it was 30 percent.

More than every third company also identified an attack from Russia, an increase of more than 50 percent.

The attackers are becoming more and more professional and can often be found in organized crime, said Bitkom President Achim Berg.

"However, it is becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate between criminal gangs and state-controlled groups."

Corona as a driver for digital attacks

Digital attacks on the economy increased, while analog attacks decreased slightly.

84 percent of companies reported an increase in cyber attacks.

This also has to do with the Corona crisis.

Many companies pushed ahead with digitization at the beginning of the pandemic - and thus also made themselves a target for hackers.

In particular, the IT systems of German medium-sized companies are currently under heavy virtual fire.

The Cisco Talos Incident Response (CTIR) team has identified some changes in attackers over the past few months.

In the second quarter of this year, for the first time in more than a year, blackmail programs, so-called ransomware, were no longer the biggest threat.

Commodity Trojans, i.e. off-the-shelf espionage and malware programs, were new at the top of the cybercriminal hit list.

They make up around 20 percent of all attacks, ransomware comes to 15 percent.

At the beginning of the year it was still 25 percent.

The reason for the decline in the use of ransomware, which first hijacks attacked computers, then encrypts the hard drives and finally demands a ransom for the necessary decryption codes, may be the recent successes of law enforcement officers.

Authorities around the world had tracked down and crushed numerous ransomware gangs in the past few months.

New virtual weapons

According to Cisco, commodity malware is now very widespread.

It can be bought online or even downloaded free of charge and is usually set up in such a way that the hackers can quickly adapt it with just a few lines of code, depending on the target of the attack.

In addition, the security house Link11 noticed a change in the procedure for using ransomware last year.

Before the computers of the potential victims are attacked with ransomware, a wave of so-called DDoS attacks sets in.

These are attacks in which systems are bombarded with data and brought to their knees.

In the first half of 2022, the peak of such attacks was reached on average 55 seconds after the start of the attack, by then it took an average of 184 seconds to reach the peak.

“These turbo attacks are extremely dangerous.

They peak very quickly instead of increasing steadily.

Such DDoS attacks are able to paralyze the network systems even before the defensive measures can take full effect," explains Marc Wilczek, Managing Director of Link11.