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Berlin (dpa) - The attacks by criminals who penetrate IT systems have increased significantly in the past year.
As the head of the Cybercrime Department at the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA), Carsten Meywirth, reported, the number of cybercrime cases rose by around 8 percent to more than 108,000 in the past year.
That was more than twice as many known crimes in this area as in 2015.
The BKA understands cybercrime in the narrower sense to be “criminal offenses directed against the Internet, information technology systems or their data”.
These include, for example, attacks that deliberately overload the network of an institution or a company.
According to the police, the greatest threat to German companies and public institutions are so-called ransomware attacks, in which databases are encrypted using malware.
Federal Interior Minister Horst Seehofer (CSU) stated in an interview with the German Press Agency last week that there was still a lot to do in cybersecurity compared to other areas.
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According to the BKA, increased attacks on companies and public institutions that are relevant to the fight against the corona pandemic have been registered since the third quarter of 2020. Vaccine portals and the entire vaccine supply chain were affected, among other things. The police also found that some operators of darknet platforms tried to prevent the sale of fake vaccines, this is probably also due to "the continuous pressure of law enforcement in recent years", according to the current federal situation report on cybercrime.
The BKA sees three main reasons for the increase in the area of cybercrime: more opportunities for offenses due to the rapidly advancing digitization, a professionalization of the perpetrators and a growing offer for technically less experienced criminals to obtain malware and other cybercrime tools as a service.
According to police statistics, of the 108,474 cybercrime cases recorded nationwide in 2020, slightly fewer than one in three were cleared up.
The clear-up rate thus remained roughly at the level of the previous year.
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CDU General Secretary Paul Ziemiak said in Berlin: «Cyber attacks are one of the greatest dangers of our time.
We want to position Germany even better in the area of cybersecurity in order to protect our citizens, our basic supply of water, electricity and telephone, our economy and democracy. "
The CDU sees this as a “core task” of the state.
"Our country needs a digital security architecture that can robustly defend us against cyber attacks."
To this end, the CDU will also significantly advance research in the field of cybersecurity.
"A robust defense against cyber attacks is also a question of location for the economy," emphasized Ziemiak.
Small and medium-sized companies in particular are still inadequately protected.
© dpa-infocom, dpa: 210510-99-543511 / 2
Federal situation report on cybercrime