Germany Unprepared to Counter Cybersecurity Threats, Information Security Chief Reveals

MOSCOW (Sputnik) - Germany is not ready to counter cybersecurity threats at the moment, the chief of the country's Federal Office for Information Security (BSI), Claudia Plattner, said on Sunday.
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To prevent cyberattacks on critical infrastructure, the authorities need to "act from the first second" and have the bigger picture of the situation, Plattner said in an interview with German newspaper Tagesspiegel.
"If necessary, crisis teams should be created and the capabilities of the federal government and the federal state authorities should be combined. We are not ready for all this today. Such coordination has not been worked out," the BSI chief said.
Competent officials should not be forced to call each other many times to find out what has happened and in which federal state, she specified.
"There are no structures that would guarantee our capability to coordinate our actions in such crisis situations," Plattner said, adding that it was "absolutely necessary" to create them.
On March 1, Margarita Simonyan, the editor-in-chief of RT and the Rossiya Segodnya international media group, Sputnik's parent company, published the readout of a conversation among four German military officers discussing a potential attack on Russia's Crimean Bridge with long-range Taurus missiles.
The talk, which took place on February 19, involved Inspector of the German air force Ingo Gerhartz, Brig. Gen. Frank Graefe, head of the operations and exercises department at the air force command in Berlin, and two employees of the air operations center of the Bundeswehr Space Command. German Chancellor Olaf Scholz promised a thorough and prompt investigation into the leaked conversation.