DGermany’s leading electronic retail chain is one of them hacker attack Was hit hard.Media market and Saturn There are more than a dozen national organizations and hundreds of stores in Europe. There was a cyber attack on Monday night. The attacker apparently successfully penetrated the core IT area of the retail chain to cause damage by deliberately freezing data and make it unusable until further notice .
A company affiliated with Ceconomy Holding in Düsseldorf immediately notified the relevant departments and is currently making every effort to identify the systems affected by the hacker attack, assess the damage, and remediate if necessary. But this may take time. Because at least some systems currently no longer work due to a large amount of frozen data.
Many services, such as financing or guarantees, can currently only be handled within a limited range of branches and stores. The spokesperson was quoted as saying that there is no need for customers to take action at this time. The online store is currently unaffected by the attack.
Big company where every second counts
Attacks on markets are part of a series of attacks on companies, organizations, and government agencies around the world. For example, these include German software companies, Microsoft, pipeline operators, and the US government. Since the outbreak of the corona crisis, their computers and IT systems have been increasingly attacked and hijacked by hackers. The attacker actually used special software to take the data on the affected computer hostage and demand a ransom to release the data—usually in the form of encrypted currency. The amount can reach millions of euros.
Tracking hackers is not easy. Given the complexity of its technical systems, this problem seems to be overwhelming for many companies. A study by IT consulting firm Accenture shows that in the face of complex cyber attacks, almost every second largest company in the world is helpless. 55% of global companies are currently unable to identify such attacks, unable to take effective action against them and quickly limit their potential consequences.
Reason: Almost no one still has a comprehensive understanding of the computer system that has been developed over the years, let alone a comprehensive one; it is also impossible to say which dark corner of the Internet the next attack will come from.Obviously it also works like this Media market And Saturn. So far, the investigation has been in the dark. Even for companies like Microsoft, it will take a few weeks at the beginning of this year to reveal the truth behind the major attacks on their systems.
With the number of attacks increasing for several months, 80% of the world’s large companies have increased their cybersecurity budgets in the past few months. But the wave of attacks rolled in almost uncontrollably. At the same time, protecting their IT systems has become so expensive that most of the nearly 4,800 companies surveyed in the Accenture study stated that the funds used could not be provided on a sustainable basis. In other words, cyber security costs billions of dollars.
Moving work to the home office during the corona crisis opened up weak wings for attackers in many systems. These take full advantage of this. In August, the Berlin industry association Bitkom estimated that the loss of the German economy caused by cyber attacks alone amounted to 220 billion euros per year. This is more than double the number of years before the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic. Since last year, nine out of ten companies have been hacked. Before Corona, only three-quarters of all companies were registered as victims. The association conducted a representative study, surveying more than 1,000 companies from all walks of life. So now Media Markt and Saturn are also affected. IT experts from the two companies will be busy in the coming weeks.
