Cybercrime and Sabotage Cost German Firms $300 Billion In Past Year

According to a new survey from Bitkom, cybercrime and other acts of sabotage have cost German companies around $298 billion in the past year, up 29% on the year before. Reuters reports: Bitkom surveyed around 1,000 companies from all sectors and found that 90% expect more cyberattacks in the next 12 months, with the remaining 10% expecting the same level of attacks. Some 70% of companies that were targeted attributed the attacks to organised crime, the survey found, adding 81% of companies reported data theft, including customer data, access data and passwords, as well as intellectual property such as patents. Around 45% of companies said they could attribute at least one attack to China, up from 42% in the previous year. Attacks blamed on Russia came in second place at 39%.

The increase in attacks has prompted companies to allocate 17% of their IT budget to digital security, up from 14% last year, but only 37% said they had an emergency plan to react to security incidents in their supply chain, the survey showed.

assume they are hacked

[ZipNada]

It seems like these companies would eventually come to realize that they most likely are penetrated at any given time. Zero trust might be helpful, but it sure does seem like they should have one or more recovery plans. Imagine the scenario where 'everything you have that's visible to a hacker will be encrypted' would be a good place to start.

A lot of it is from Russia and North Korea

[rsilvergun]

State actors are hard to defend against especially when you're not really bringing to bear the resources of a state actor against them. There needs to be more help from the actual government to fend off these attacks. As well as more regulation to discourage companies from allowing the attacks because the cost of protecting against them is often higher than the cost of just letting them happen

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[drinkypoo]

I'm quite surprised every nation doesn't have its own great firewall equivalent.

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[Fly Swatter]

Sadly this is where we are going to wind up unless something major changes. Systems are just too complex to expect anything to be foolproof, more so since social engineering is still the biggest point of failure that is impossible to completely mitigate.

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[drinkypoo]

Does it not in fact actually make sense?

Are there not in fact national security issues which might best be handled with such an approach?

The problem isn't having one, it's what jackals are in charge of it. We have to take our "democracy" (or the amount we are so far allowed to have) seriously, and then get more democracy in it so that our voices actually matter and we don't have minorities making decisions for the majority as we do now. And hopefully, not the other way around either, but there is frequently

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[jsonn]

First, it would help if our idiotic politicians hadn't made security research illegal a long time ago. Of course, they won't fix that this time either. Second, it would help if our secret services would prioritize the safety of the population over their own data gathering abilities. Not going to happen, of course. Third, who needs enemies if you have friends like the USA and their secret services spying for business advantages? It's funny that Boeing is still going the way of the Dodo even with all the help

That could pay for an awful lot of file clerks

[ebunga]

And they would still have $150,000,000 left over. But hey, have to make everything as efficient as possible, right?

Guessing next up is automated ransomware payments.

is microsoft, cisco, or vmware involved?

[Big Hairy Gorilla]

asking for a friend.

Eventually

[Hoi Polloi]

What they'll eventually need to do is air gap their companies. This has reached national security threat level. States may need to start their own version of tcp/ip protocols that limit access and eliminate anonymous use.

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[gweihir]

That is not possible with current tech. And anyways, there is a lot to be done in the are of secure software engineering that has been left not-done. And, if done, it will nicely make hacking non-profitable. But it will require throwing away some houses-of-cards that have been created over decades (MS, I am looking at you and the crappy ecosystem you created).

7% of GDP

[dpille]

I don't buy it. Cybercrime costs Germany more than half what they spend on health care? Really?

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[gweihir]

Better believe it. Germans are _good_ at accounting.

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[AmiMoJo]

Bitkom is a lobbying group, so of course they massively exaggerate the costs.

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[mjwx]

I don't buy it. Cybercrime costs Germany more than half what they spend on health care? Really?

There are lies, damned lies and what you tell your insurance company it cost.

These are projected losses to the entire economy, so they take a small sample, carefully cherry pick the data to show what they want and then scale it up to the whole size of the nations economy and then some.

This isn't a cost that literally came out of German coffers (public or private) it's an estimation of how much more they theoretically could have made based on what companies claimed on insurance and tax write offs.

That number can't be right

[kwelch007]

7.5% of Germany's GDP? Either somebody isn't doing their Cybersecurity homework or that number is inflated.