Cracked Internet accounts: BSI safety test now accessible to the masses - ABC Online

After millions of theft of online access concerned Internet users have flooded the website of the competent authority requests.

The Federal Office for Security in Information Technology (BSI) edited by Wednesday afternoon over 12 million requests, BSI president Michael Hange said in Berlin. Among them were 884 000 sufferers. The Authority was trying to cope with the onslaught of requests, Hange told the news agency dpa on the sidelines of a conference on cyber security.

test at the address www.sicherheitstest.bsi.de was on Wednesday significantly better to achieve than the previous day. The BSI wanted to learn from the case. Experts warned that such attacks on user data could occur more frequently in the future.

The BSI have already experienced before December of the theft, said Hange dpa. Just before Christmas, the BSI then got the release for it to issue a warning. “Such an action must, however, be extremely well prepared,” he said. The BSI have, for example, used the time to program a security check and resolve privacy issues. The chief authorities assured: “We have made very quickly. There’s nothing faster. “

The supreme authority for IT security in Germany had announced on Tuesday that 16 million user accounts have been hijacked. The BSI assumes that about half of them belong to users from Germany. The warning spread very quickly. The BSI website, could check on the people, whether they are concerned, went after a short time under the flood of inquiries to its knees. Hange said the site had now been reprogrammed. The Authority is in the process to solve the congestion problems. The rush of inquiries have a new dimension.

for the BSI

The stolen records contained According to the BSI usually an email address and a password. Researchers and prosecutors were pushed to the data and have it transferred to the Federal Office.

Not all affected mail addresses would still be used, stressed Hange. Many of the captured addresses were not from Germany, but from other EU countries. It should therefore be assumed that behind the theft put an international network.

criminals could use the data to log about with online stores on behalf of the user and spend money there, the director of the European Agency for Network and Information Security Agency (ENISA), Udo Helmbrecht warned. Internet users should not use it for several online services have the same combination of email address and password. “We need to be sure you choose a different password for each case. For convenience, do not do that as users often. “

criminals could earn a lot of money with the accounts data. In the Cyber ??Security Conference Hange said: “With botnets can easily swindle millions of dollars.” From cyber attacks were all affected. Citizens, government and business

access emerged in the analysis of botnets. The networks are hijacked computers that have been infected often without the knowledge of users with malicious software. Criminals use such zombie computers, for example, to mass e-mails to send advertising or malicious programs.

Alone on the power of the federal government, there are, according to BSI 2000 to 3000 attacks per day. About five attacks a day are doing so on a high technical level that an intelligence background was to insinuate. Many companies are, according to the experts victim of cyber attacks, these silent for fear of reputational damage but often.

network policy spokesman for the SPD parliamentary group, Lars Klingbeil, called for in view of the case for more investment in security research. “This case shows how the topic of identity theft has developed in the network, and that we will have with it in the future probably still much to do,” Klingbeil said the newspaper “Tagesspiegel” (Wednesday). The IT Commissioner of the Federal Government, Cornelia Rogall-Grothe, expects that there will be more such incidents in the future. She announced that the government wanted to expand the capacity at BSI.