Cybercrime losses in the German economy increased to 267 billion euros

Bitkom and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution presented the "Wirtschaftsschutz 2024" study on Wednesday. According to the study, the economic damage caused to German companies by attacks in the past twelve months amounted to around 267 billion euros, an increase from around 206 billion euros in the same period last year. More than 1,000 companies from all sectors were surveyed; Verfassungsschutz and Bitkom describe the survey as representative.

According to the study, 81% of companies were victims of theft of data and IT equipment, digital and analog industrial espionage or sabotage, with a further 10% of companies at least suspecting this. This also represents an increase from 72 percent and 8 percent respectively. Cyber attacks are responsible for 67% of the total damage, around 179 billion euros.

Most attacks are carried out by organized crime

Companies that were victims of such cyber attacks were able to attribute 70 percent of the perpetrators to organized crime, compared to only 61 percent previously. Foreign intelligence services are now responsible for 20 percent of attacks, a significant increase from 7 percent previously. Here, 45% of the affected companies were able to trace the attacks back to China, while 39% had their origin in Russia – Here, the two countries have swapped places in a year-on-year comparison. Only 20% of attacks came from Germany, compared to 29% in the same period last year.

Businesses are becoming more aware of the scope of such attacks: around two thirds of companies (65%) see cyber attacks as a threat to their existence, compared to only half of companies (52%) in the previous year – In 2021, only 9% of companies saw the cyber threat in this way. Just over half of companies (53%) believe they are well prepared for cyberattacks.

Digital attacks are on the rise, with 74% of companies affected by digital espionage regarding business data – an increase of 4 percentage points. This includes customer data, access data and passwords, intellectual property such as patents and information from research and development or emails. Overall, there was an increase in "classic analog attacks". These include the theft of IT and telecommunications equipment, which affected 62% of companies – the figure is slightly down. However, the theft of physical documents, samples or components increased, as did the interception of telephone calls or on-site meetings.

Supply chain security is therefore still widely neglected. Only 37 percent of companies stated that they had a contingency plan in place should suppliers have security incidents. A further 37 percent admitted that there was a lack of security awareness within the company.

"Companies most frequently report damage caused by ransomware (31 percent, up 8 percentage points), followed by phishing attacks (26 percent, down 5 percentage points), attacks on passwords (24 percent, down 5 percentage points) and infection with malware (21 percent, down 7 percent). Distributed denial of service attacks, which paralyze web servers for example (18%, up 6 percentage points), also frequently cause damage," explains the Office for the Protection of the Constitution.

Spending on IT security as a proportion of the IT budget has risen from 14% to 17%. 39 percent of companies spend 20 percent or more of their IT budget on IT security, according to the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and Bitkom.

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The survey was conducted by Bitkom Research on behalf of the digital association Bitkom. A total of 1003 companies with ten or more employees and an annual turnover of at least one million euros in Germany were surveyed by telephone. The survey took place between week 16 and week 24 in 2024 and is representative according to Bitkom.

(dmk)