GERMANY IS under attack from an increasing number of state-backed Chinese spying operations that are costing the German economy tens of billions of euro 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, southwest Germany, said 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 one 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 knowhow, which “helps save billions on their own economic research and development”. He said that while Russia only had “hundreds of thousands of agents”, compared to China’s one million, it had “years more experience”.
Mr Opfermann estimated that German companies were losing about €50 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.
Mr 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. – ( Guardianservice)