North Rhine-Westphalia (NRW) wants to improve protection for critical infrastructure, saying the industrial and most populous German state faces particular risks from hybrid attacks. At a resilience summit in Düsseldorf, state premier Hendrik Wüst called for closer cooperation between Germany’s federal, state and local governments.
The meeting brought together representatives from Germany and countries including the Baltic states, Ukraine, Poland, Israel and Japan. NRW hopes to learn from their approaches to countering cyberattacks and other hybrid threats, and to strengthen resilience across government and society.
Wüst said Germany faces a real threat and needs to act quickly. Recent incidents cited at the summit included a security flaw in the PHP programming language that disrupted websites worldwide, attacks on supermarket refrigeration systems across Europe, and a suspected act of sabotage at a substation in NRW that nearly caused a widespread power outage in September.
The article also cited a compromised Ukrainian warning app that unexpectedly indicated a nuclear attack. The incidents illustrate the range of threats that NRW wants to be better prepared to address.
Sources: Handelsblatt.