Ever heard of a DDoS attack? The abbreviation stands for Distributed Denial of Service — a deliberate blockade of digital services. If you have ever tried for hours to access the tax office's website, a university, or a telecommunications provider without success, it could have been because of a DDoS attack.

Municipal authorities, parliaments, political parties or prominent companies are often the targets. For example, on February 12, in the northern German city-state of Bremen,  residents could not contact the police for almost two hours.

It turned out that 18,000 online requests per minute had inundated the servers. The system collapsed under the load. If the anonymous attackers aimed to unsettle the public, they succeeded. According to Bremen's Interior Ministry, Russian hackers admitted to carrying out the attack.

Digital attacks are the 'new reality'

The damage caused was rectified quickly, much to Carola Heilemann-Jeschke's relief. She is the Chief Information Officer (CIO) in charge of IT security in Bremen. Cyberattacks like the one in February are the "new reality," she said in a podcast for the public-service media outlet Behörden Spiegel. "We are going to have to get used to the fact that we are dealing with these attacks on a daily basis."

This year, the Conference for National Cybersecurity, which takes place annually in Potsdam, looked at how significant the overall threat is and what Germany can do to protect itself better.

The conference's host, Christian Dörr from the Hasso Plattner Institute (HPI), believes that Germany has much catching up to do, particularly for its smaller and medium-sized companies and state authorities, he told DW.

Bremen got off relatively lightly. But other cases have had much worse consequences. A cyberattack in the district of Anhalt-Bitterfeld in eastern Germany that put the entire administration offline for half a year caused a great stir in 2021.

Given such cases, Dörr considers investing more in digital security an urgent need, as these types of attacks mean that "a municipality is not functional for weeks and months, and citizens suffer for it."

Private and state-sponsored cybercriminals also carry out even more dangerous attacks on vital infrastructure such as hospitals, railroads, or power plants. Surgeons can not operate without electricity, and train services cannot function. Such threat scenarios are a lucrative business for cybercrime syndicates.

Ransom for encrypted computer data

Anonymous hackers can also gain access to computers,  and in the worst case, encrypt the entire system with ransomware. As the name suggests, the criminals often demand money from their victims in exchange for making programs accessible once more.

Statistics from Germany's Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) for 2024 show the dimensions cyber criminality has now taken on: more than 333,000 registered cybercrimes from inside Germany and abroad. Moreover, 90% more cases are thought to go unreported.

What is more, the situation is becoming ever more complex. "We are seeing a growing degree of professionalization," BKA head Holger Münch said at the Potsdam conference.

He says the attackers are increasingly employing artificial intelligence (AI), a technology that the BKA is also using to combat cybercrime. Münch feels that his office is headed in the right direction, but concedes that there is room for improvement. "I believe that we now have functioning strategies, but we have to get better and faster."

The same goes for other agencies and large parts of the private sector. Partly for this reason, Christian Dörr and his team from the Hasso Plattner Institute brought relevant actors together at their conference. This year, special attention was paid to companies that specialize in surveillance systems for pipelines, railroad lines and wind power plants.

Hi-tech sabotage prevention

One way of cyberattack prevention is fitting delicate glass-fiber cables with sensors that send acoustic signals and make them visible on a monitor. This technology detects suspicious activities near electricity and telecommunications cables, even far out at sea and underwater. Security authorities suspect Russia is often behind such sabotage operations on critical infrastructure.

Bernd Drapp from AP Sensing explained how suspicious ships can be recognized using modern technology and AI. "There is a very different sound pattern when a motor keeps revving up and then stopping again than when a freighter is traveling at a constant speed," he said.

The same sensor-based surveillance can be used to detect when anchors are dragged over the seabed or divers approach an undersea cable.

Despite these possibilities, Germany remains vulnerable, for example, because public administrations and some private businesses underestimate the danger of cyberattacks by continuing to use outdated IT systems.

Christian Dörr from the Hasso Plattner Institute calls for even closer cooperation between the state and businesses to reduce such vulnerabilities and make systems more resilient across the board, so that "we can feel safe as citizens and that our society functions."

This article was originally written in German.

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