The German government is preparing an overhaul of its intelligence and cybersecurity powers to fight back against foreign hackers and spies with offensive cyber operations of its own.
Officials are drafting two pieces of legislation, one revising the powers of Germany’s foreign intelligence services to allow them to conduct cyber operations abroad, and another giving security services more power to fight back against hybrid threats, according to the Interior Ministry. Germany has been flooded by a wave of digital and hybrid disruptions, from drone incursions over airports in Berlin and Munich to a cyberattack on the country’s air traffic control system.
Read more…
Source: Politico News
Sign up for the Cyber Security Review Newsletter
The latest cyber security news and insights delivered right to your inbox
Related:
- Excel Files with Hidden Sheets Target Users in Italy
May 5, 2020
A spam campaign using emails that have Excel file (.xls) attachments (detected by Trend Micro as Trojan.XF.HIDDBOOK.THDBHBO) has been seen circulating and targeting users in Italy and some users in Germany and other countries. The attachment appears blank when opened, but it has a sheet set to “hidden” that attempts to connect to a URL and download a ...
- German government might have lost tens of millions of euros in COVID-19 phishing attack
April 18, 2020
The government of North Rhine-Westphalia, a province in western Germany, is believed to have lost tens of millions of euros after it failed to build a secure website for distributing coronavirus emergency aid funding. The funds were lost following a classic phishing operation. Cybercriminals created copies of an official website that the NRW Ministry of Economic Affairs had set ...
- Swiss encryption company secretly owned by U.S. and German intelligence agencies
February 11, 2020
The U.S. intelligence community actively monitored for decades the diplomatic and military communications of numerous Latin American nations through encryption machines supplied by a Swiss company that was secretly owned by the CIA and the German intelligence agency, BND, according to reports today by the German public television channel, ZDF and the Washington Post. Declassified records ...
- DanaBot banking Trojan jumps from Australia to Germany in quest for new targets
August 15, 2019
The DanaBot banking Trojan is on the move and has traveled across the sea in a pivot from its original focus on Australia to strike European targets. DanaBot was first discovered by Proofpoint researchers last year. The malware was observed striking Australian targets of financial value, but at the time, DanaBot appeared to come from only one threat ...
- Germany and the Netherlands to build the first ever joint military internet
June 28, 2019
Government officials from Germany and the Netherlands have signed an agreement this week to build the first-ever joint military internet. The accord was signed on Wednesday in Brussels, Belgium, where NATO defense ministers met this week. The name of this new Dutch-German military internet is the Tactical Edge Networking, or TEN, for short. This is the first time ...
- German States Approve Criminal Law Targeting Dark Web Infrastructure
March 18, 2019
Germany’s federal states have voted in favour of a measure to extend criminal sanctions against those providing infrastructure to so-called “dark web” sites used for illegal purposes, such as selling firearms, drugs or illegal content. The measure, which critics have called overly broad, is the latest sign of a crackdown in Europe and elsewhere on the internet’s perceived ...