"First of all, Germany must hold out against cyberthreats, with respect to this we are still at the beginning of our path," Merkel said after the meeting with the prime ministers of the Czech Republic and Slovakia, Bohuslav Sobotka and Robert Fico.
On March 30, German media reported that the German Defense Ministry would launch a Cyber- and Information Space Command in April that would take over the army’s cybersecurity capabilities.
According to the German Defense Ministry, in the first nine weeks of 2017, there have been over 280,000 attempts to breach its cyberdefenses.
German cybersecurity and intelligence services have been on alert since a breach of the Bundestag network in May 2015. The incident resulted in 16 Gigabyte of sensitive parliamentary data being leaked to what German media claimed was a Russian group of hackers. However, no direct proof for these allegations was provided.
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