Companies in Germany are under pressure on three fronts due to changing threat landscapes: cyberattacks can disrupt production and business processes; industrial espionage jeopardises know-how and competitiveness; and sabotage affects critical infrastructure and supply chains. The panel discussion “A Resilient Economy: Companies Facing Cyberattacks, Espionage and Sabotage” provides answers on how companies can protect themselves and remain capable of acting in the event of a crisis.

“It is not a question of whether we will fall victim to an attack, but how we deal with it,” says Dr Bernd Calaminus, Head of Business Resilience at EnBW AG, an energy company and operator of critical infrastructure.

Resilience and prevention are key, for example through the development of scenarios and analogue fallback processes to ensure business continuity.

“But we cannot monitor a 150,000-kilometre electricity grid or secure all 300 substations,” says Calaminus. This is also a question of cost. “It is also crucial to get back on our feet quickly after an attack.”

A shared situational picture for industry and public authorities

Christian Fischbach, Head of Strategy, Markets & Business Development at Schwarz Digits Defence – which, as part of the Schwarz Group, spoke on behalf of the food sector alongside Lidl and Kaufland – would like to see more multinational exchange and joint solutions. “As a critical infrastructure company, we should be involved in defence strategies not only as those affected, but also as active participants,” he says. In addition to joint exercises, he would also like to see a digital situational overview in which all available information can be accessed in real time, but into which companies can also feed their own data.

At present, the situational overviews from various agencies are not even consolidated centrally and systematically, says Dr. habil. Annegret Bendiek, Senior Fellow at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs (SWP). “We need a shift in mindset: it is not a question of state security or economic security, but the security of our society as a whole; we are one entity,” says Bendiek. Ideally, such a situational overview would then need to be conceived on a pan-European scale.

Businesses could play a key role in this in several ways. “The business community is approaching this with too little self-confidence. It must be part of a national security council and demand that it be so,” says the researcher. Particularly when public coffers are empty, it is the business community’s responsibility to help drive research forward so that threats can be countered not only organisationally but also technically.