Industrial companies: 43 billion euros in damage

Criminal attacks hit industrial companies particularly hard: sabotage, data theft and espionage have caused total damage to German industry of 43.4 billion euros in the past two years.

Seven out of ten industrial companies (68 percent) have fallen victim to such attacks during this period, and one in five companies (19 percent) suspect that they have.

This is the result of a study by the digital association Bitkom, for which 503 managing directors and security managers across all industry sectors were representatively surveyed.

"With its world market leaders, German industry is particularly interesting for criminals"

said Bitkom President Achim Berg at the presentation of the study in Berlin.

"Those who fail to invest in IT security are acting negligently and putting their businesses at risk."

For example, IT or telecommunications equipment has been stolen from one-third of companies (32 percent) in the past two years, and sensitive digital data has leaked from nearly one-quarter (23 percent).

"Illegal knowledge and technology transfer, social engineering and also economic sabotage are not rare individual cases but a mass phenomenon"

stressed Thomas Haldenwang, Vice President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV).