Berlin (AFP) – Cyberattacks and sabotage, mainly from Russia and China, have caused record damages for German firms this year, the domestic spy service and a business group warned Thursday. The costs of such attacks topped 289 billion euros ($342 billion) in 2025, up eight percent on last year, said the corporate survey on attacks such as data theft, industrial espionage and sabotage.
“Increasingly the trail leads to Russia and China,” said the report presented by the BfV domestic intelligence agency and the Bitkom federation of digital businesses. “Foreign intelligence agencies are increasingly targeting the German economy,” BfV vice president Sinan Selen told a press conference.
Selen — who is set to soon take over at the helm of the BfV — said hostile foreign intelligence agencies were “becoming more professional, aggressive and agile.” He said Chinese attacks are primarily “economic espionage” to gain technological advantages, while Russia’s consist mainly of “sabotage” and spreading “disinformation.”
Selen said state actors had been identified as being behind the attacks by 28 percent of the businesses concerned, as opposed to 20 percent last year. Speaking alongside Selen, Bitkom president Ralf Wintergerst said attacks saw a “disproportionate rise when compared to German economic growth,” which has been flatlining since 2023.
Out of the 1,002 businesses surveyed for the report, 87 percent said they had been targeted by such an attack, compared to 81 percent the year before. While last year 39 percent of firms said they had been targeted by Russia, this year that number rose to 46 percent, with the same number reporting an attack from China.
The most effective method remained cyberattacks, often carried out with “ransomware,” the overall cost of which has reached a new record high of 202 billion euros. Selen gave the example of Kremlin-affiliated hackers known as Laundry Bear or Void Blizzard, which act against German political and economic targets.
Bitkom advised companies to devote 20 percent of their IT budgets to defending against these attacks. Selen said he was “very happy” that Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s government was “accentuating and strengthening” the role of the intelligence community in this area.
© 2024 AFP
