It's hard to believe, but the password most commonly used in Germany is the digits 123456. This finding, which has been proven by studies, shows how careless the Germans continue to be when it comes to protecting their personal data.

The idea that 123456 could be a good access code for a private online account, for example, is about as clever as putting the key to the front door under the doormat: both are a hurdle that criminals can easily jump over.

In German living rooms and thus also in offices, the realization has not yet caught on that cybercrime is no longer a hobby of money-hungry IT nerds, but a global billion-dollar business in which professionally organized blackmail groups openly offer their services on the Darknet.

According to the IT industry association Bitkom, in Germany alone the damage caused to companies by cyber attacks was 223 billion euros in 2021 - more than twice as high as in 2019 and more than four times as high as in 2017. This is mostly about industrial espionage, Blackmail, but also credit card fraud, the theft of crypto money or data theft are registered.

In addition to this financial motivation, Russia's war in Ukraine also revealed the political dimension of a cyber war: as in the physical world, there are entire armies of hackers on the Internet.

They don't have tanks and rockets, but use the means of the digital world to hit their opponents.

The consequences are generally underestimated: Attacks on a country's infrastructure, such as electricity and water supplies, communication networks or even military targets, can cause considerable damage to a country and its people and destabilize democracies in the medium term.

The idea of ​​traffic or security technologies or hospitals being unplugged by cybercriminals inevitably leads to horror scenarios.

Hacker attacks are a ticking time bomb.

DDos attack with success

Attacks by Russian hackers on the Bundestag and the Ministry of Defense prove that they have to be taken seriously and that cyber attacks can be part of modern warfare.

At the end of April, the Hessian police also temporarily took their website

polizei.hessen.de offline

because of “increased overload attacks”, as it was said.

Accordingly, the police server, like those of other authorities throughout Germany, was flooded with a large number of requests with the aim of overloading the server and removing it from the network.

The so-called DDoS attack was apparently successful because: The websites of police headquarters in Hesse with their offers were temporarily unavailable.

Even if the State Criminal Police Office of Hesse pointed out that the temporary shutdown of the website was a precautionary measure, the case shows the damage cybercriminals are causing to public institutions.

This week municipal companies were the target.

The Frankfurt waste disposal service provider FES had to shut down websites that were located at the Darmstadt data center operator Count+Care, which in turn belongs to the energy company Entega AG, which itself was the target of an attack.

Although the critical networks for electricity, gas and water were not affected, the personnel accounts of the 2000 employees were encrypted, the ransom is at stake.

Stadtwerke Mainz, the supermarket chain Tegut and the service provider Wisag have also been victims of cybercriminals in recent months.

There is a lot at stake for companies: if websites are taken offline, if data is stolen or supply chains are disrupted, entire companies can be ruined.