It cannot be overlooked: Cyber attacks in Germany are increasing. The Federal Office for Information Security assumes a total of 144 million different attacks with malware for the period from the beginning of June 2020 to the end of May 2021 – that is 394,000 per day. Overall, an increase of 22 percent compared to the same period last year.
No question: The threat is growing, which is hardly surprising since Germany is the European champion when it comes to patent applications.
The new knowledge seems interesting to many. Cyber criminals can pick it up practically anywhere in the world if adequate protection is not in place. If they succeed in acquiring expensive and time-consuming research results and then bringing them to market quickly, they are the ones who skim off the profits. From a German and European point of view, preventing this is also of geostrategic interest, especially since “war-like” conditions now prevail on the Internet and even state actors such as China, Russia, North Korea and Iran are appearing.
But private cybercriminals also use weaknesses in companies’ IT to extort money. The ransomware Trojan is the most commonly used.
Cyber attacks that have successfully penetrated the IT infrastructure of companies have already caused enormous economic damage, paralyzed entire supply chains and triggered supply shortages. For this reason, the German IT security law has now been improved in order to better protect the critical infrastructure in particular.
Today it is no longer a sole business decision to protect yourself from cyber attacks. It’s a legal requirement. When it comes to attacks on the knowledge of European industry, the focus is currently on the chemical industry, especially the health sector. The European Medicines Agency (Ema) reported in 2020 that cyber attackers had tried to gain access to documents relating to the vaccines against Covid-19. The companies Pfizer, Biontech and Moderna are said to have been affected. Vaccine supply chains have also been targeted by cybercriminals.
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No industry is immune to cyber theft
The chemical industry is also interesting because of its patents in the field of nutrition. With methionine, Evonik supplies a product for sustainable animal breeding that is particularly important for supplying the population with proteins. The knowledge needed to manufacture the product is of particular interest to China. As is well known, the People’s Republic has 1.4 billion people to feed and very little arable land to farm.
However, no industry sector, no company and no authority is immune to cyber theft, as reported by the Federal Criminal Police Office. European industrial data is also endangered by digital clouds on which economic ecosystems are formed. Eco-systems integrate supply chains across companies and national borders. This brings great advantages for business processes and the use of resources. However, there are also risks – such as the manipulation of data with serious consequences for the entire supply chain.
However, cloud platforms can also be tapped by foreign secret services if different, globally distributed data centers compare the data with each other so that all employees can access the same data set. The good news: there is a solution to at least make the supply chains much more secure. And it’s called blockchain.
So far, no one has managed to crack the blockchain, not even quantum computers. Once the data is set on the blockchain, nobody can manipulate it. If an attempt is made nonetheless, all participants in the supply chain will notice this immediately, because everyone is accessing the same original master data in real time. This is a novelty. Before the data comes onto the blockchain, it is checked by mathematical consensus processes by everyone who is allowed to participate in the blockchain.
The data comes directly from its source
Attempts at manipulation can be clearly identified, since the algorithmic calculation is then no longer correct. Every change can be traced back in minute detail. Encryption in so-called hashes makes European industrial data even more secure. According to experts, the blockchain is actually an impenetrable chain today – and will remain so for a long time to come. At the same time, it also protects against blackmail.
Stealing data no longer makes sense. Because all data is stored decentrally on many computers, it is never lost, unlike in the cloud, which has a center. If the cloud center is hacked, the data is gone. In addition, the blockchain also enables more process security because the data comes directly from its source, for example from the product. This creates a data quality along the entire supply chain that has never existed before.
In addition, the blockchain offers a process flow without any data break. The scaling possibilities are almost unlimited because the blockchain is a kind of data register with enormous capacity. Far too little is known about the potential of the blockchain. That has to change if we want to effectively protect our company data. However, there was still a weak point: the data was only secure once it was on the blockchain.
New sensor closes security gap
But this security gap has now been closed by a new sensor that scans the product’s data and sets it on the blockchain. The sensor itself works like a blockchain. The big difference is that the mathematical questions that secure access to the sensor are not based on a static process, such as the PIN process on our bank cards, which can be cracked with some effort. Instead, the mathematical questions are generated according to an algorithmic random principle.
The threat to company data is also a well-known problem in Brussels. EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyen declared in 2020 that the 27 member states had been too slow with personal data and that this should not be repeated with industrial data. That is why the EU Commission relies on blockchain technology for both industrial data and the personal data of citizens and is working on setting up a European blockchain infrastructure.
This is a good signal because then European industrial data and also medium-sized companies, which often do not have sufficient means to protect themselves against cyber attacks, can secure their data in blockchain-based supply chains. The news is also good for another reason: Germany is the world leader in technological applications on the blockchain.
More: Global hacker gangs threaten Germany