Germany is under attack from an increasing number of state-backed Chinese spying operations that are costing the German economy tens of billions of euros a year, a leading German counter-intelligence agent has said.
Walter Opfermann, an espionage protection expert in the office for counter-intelligence for the state of Baden-Wurttemberg, said that China was using an array of “polished methods” from old-fashioned spies to phone-tapping, and increasingly the Internet, to steal industrial secrets.
He said methods had become “extremely sophisticated,” to the extent that China, which employs a million intelligence agents, was now capable of “sabotaging whole chunks of infrastructure,” such as Germany’s power grid.
“This poses a danger not just for Germany but for critical infrastructure worldwide,” he said.
Russia, he said, was also “top of the list” of states using Internet spying techniques to garner vital German know-how that “helps save billions on their own economic research and development.”
He said while Russia only had “hundreds of thousands of agents,” it had “years more experience” than China.
Opfermann estimated that German companies were losing around 50 billion euros (US$71 billion) and 30,000 jobs to industrial espionage every year.
The areas most under attack include car manufacturing, renewable energies, chemistry, communication, optics, X-ray technology, machinery, materials research and armaments. Information being gathered was not just related to research and development but also management techniques and marketing strategies.
Opfermann said Internet espionage was the biggest growth field, citing the “thick fog of Trojan e-mail attacks” taking place against thousands of firms on a regular basis and the methods employed to cover up where the e-mails had come from.
But he said “old-fashioned” methods were also rife, such as phone-tapping, stealing laptops during business trips or Chinese companies who regularly sent spies to infiltrate companies.
“I cannot name names, but we’ve dealt with several cases of Chinese citizens on work experience in German companies, who stole highly sensitive information from them,” he said.
In one case, the police raided the house of a Chinese woman suspected of stealing company secrets from a German business where she was working, and discovered 170 CDs containing highly sensitive product details.
In a separate case, a highly qualified Chinese mechanical engineer employed by a company in the Lake Constance region was discovered to have passed on information for a machine it was developing to the company’s Chinese competitor, who constructed an exact copy.
“As is often the case, the man disappeared and went back to China. So often the attacker is way ahead of the game and it’s also hard to find out who they’ve been working for,” he said.
Two years ago, consultancy firm Corporate Trust estimated that around 20 percent of German companies — mainly small and middle-sized businesses — had been the victims of industrial espionage.
POLITICAL PRISONERS VS DEPORTEES: Venezuela’s prosecutor’s office slammed the call by El Salvador’s leader, accusing him of crimes against humanity Salvadoran President Nayib Bukele on Sunday proposed carrying out a prisoner swap with Venezuela, suggesting he would exchange Venezuelan deportees from the US his government has kept imprisoned for what he called “political prisoners” in Venezuela. In a post on X, directed at Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro, Bukele listed off a number of family members of high-level opposition figures in Venezuela, journalists and activists detained during the South American government’s electoral crackdown last year. “The only reason they are imprisoned is for having opposed you and your electoral fraud,” he wrote to Maduro. “However, I want to propose a humanitarian agreement that
ECONOMIC WORRIES: The ruling PAP faces voters amid concerns that the city-state faces the possibility of a recession and job losses amid Washington’s tariffs Singapore yesterday finalized contestants for its general election on Saturday next week, with the ruling People’s Action Party (PAP) fielding 32 new candidates in the biggest refresh of the party that has ruled the city-state since independence in 1965. The move follows a pledge by Singaporean Prime Minister Lawrence Wong (黃循財), who took office last year and assumed the PAP leadership, to “bring in new blood, new ideas and new energy” to steer the country of 6 million people. His latest shake-up beats that of predecessors Lee Hsien Loong (李顯龍) and Goh Chok Tong (吳作棟), who replaced 24 and 11 politicians respectively
Young women standing idly around a park in Tokyo’s west suggest that a giant statue of Godzilla is not the only attraction for a record number of foreign tourists. Their faces lit by the cold glow of their phones, the women lining Okubo Park are evidence that sex tourism has developed as a dark flipside to the bustling Kabukicho nightlife district. Increasing numbers of foreign men are flocking to the area after seeing videos on social media. One of the women said that the area near Kabukicho, where Godzilla rumbles and belches smoke atop a cinema, has become a “real
‘WATER WARFARE’: A Pakistani official called India’s suspension of a 65-year-old treaty on the sharing of waters from the Indus River ‘a cowardly, illegal move’ Pakistan yesterday canceled visas for Indian nationals, closed its airspace for all Indian-owned or operated airlines, and suspended all trade with India, including to and from any third country. The retaliatory measures follow India’s decision to suspend visas for Pakistani nationals in the aftermath of a deadly attack by shooters in Kashmir that killed 26 people, mostly tourists. The rare attack on civilians shocked and outraged India and prompted calls for action against their country’s archenemy, Pakistan. New Delhi did not publicly produce evidence connecting the attack to its neighbor, but said it had “cross-border” links to Pakistan. Pakistan denied any connection to