BKA situation report
Cyber attacks will continue to rise in 2023
Bernhard Rohleder, managing director of the Federal Association for Information Technology, Telecommunications and New Media, warns of cyber attacks: “The damage is 148 billion euros per year.” photo
© Peter Steffen/dpa
Cybercrime is increasingly a concern for the German police, but also for the economy. An association sounds the alarm.
According to the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) continued to rise in the past year. This emerges from the latest “Federal Cybercrime Situation Report”, which was presented in Wiesbaden.
“The police database, but also the findings of individual IT security service providers, show a further increasing trend in cyber attacks in both quantitative and qualitative terms for 2023,” says the report.
This development is particularly responsible for cases that cause damage in Germany, but where the perpetrator’s whereabouts are abroad or are unknown. According to the federal situation report for 2023, the recorded cybercrime crimes committed abroad rose by around 28 percent compared to the previous year. Looking at the country, the police crime statistics recorded a slight decline in cyber crimes of minus 1.8 percent for the same period.
The most serious threats continue to be ransomware attacks, in which criminals encrypt company or public administration data and demand a ransom for decryption. Nationwide, more than 800 companies and institutions reported ransomware cases in 2023, according to the federal situation report.
High amounts of damage were again caused by cybercrime in 2023, as the BKA explained and referred to figures from the digital association Bitkom. Accordingly, the total damage from analog and digital theft, industrial espionage or sabotage for companies in Germany amounted to 205.9 billion euros. According to information, Bitkom attributes almost three quarters of this total damage to cyber attacks. The explicitly stated damage caused by blackmail with stolen or encrypted data amounts to 16.1 billion euros.