BSI management report: Cyber ​​criminals sometimes make efforts like spies

BSI management report
Cyber ​​criminals sometimes make efforts like spies

The threat posed by cyber attacks in Germany has grown significantly over the past twelve months. This emerges from the 2021 management report of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI).

It assesses the current situation as “tense to critical”. A year earlier, the Bonn authority had characterized the situation as “tense”.

Very complex, multi-stage attack strategies

According to the BSI, criminals now sometimes use very complex, multi-stage attack strategies that were previously only used in cyber espionage. One method: while a criminal hacker is negotiating a ransom with his victim for access to data he has encrypted, he is simultaneously launching an overload attack on an alternative system that the victim uses to continue his business activities. Or the perpetrator publishes captured data on so-called leak pages in order to put the victim under even more pressure.

According to this, some attackers also approach customers or partners of the victim in order to increase the pressure. As an example, the BSI cites the case of a psychotherapeutic practice in its report, where not only the practice owners but also their patients were blackmailed.

More and more malware variants

According to the BSI, the number of registered new variants of malware was 144 million, 22 percent more than in the previous reporting period. According to the Federal Office, 553,000 malware variants were discovered in one day in February 2021 – a new record.

According to the report, a large number of attacks were recorded between January and May in which blackmailers pretended to have video material of the victim allegedly showing them while visiting a website with pornographic content. The threat: If the victim does not pay a four-digit euro amount in Bitcoin, the compromising video will be sent to all contacts of the victim.

dpa