Incidents in country:
19 incidents catalogued
The fast-growing extortion group TheGentlemen added German naval-defense electronics manufacturer Atlas Elektronik to its dark-web leak site on 28 June 2026, claiming a double-extortion attack dated to around 25 June, though the TKMS subsidiary had not publicly confirmed any breach.
A dataset dubbed FortiBleed exposed valid Fortinet FortiGate VPN credentials — including plaintext passwords — for 73,932 firewall URLs across 194 countries, the product of a Russian-speaking crew that reused passwords from earlier breaches and infostealer logs rather than any new Fortinet vulnerability.
In March 2025, data from Samsung Germany was compromised in a data breach of their logistics provider, Spectos. Allegedly due to credentials being obtained by malware running on a Spectos employee's machine, the breach included 216k unique email addresses along with names, physical addresses, items…
In January 2025, the Rezeptwelt (German for "recipe world") forum for Thermomix owners suffered a data breach. The incident exposed 3.1M registered users' details including names, email and physical addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth and bios (usually cooking related).
In September 2024, data from the online German gift store schenkYOU was put up for sale on a popular hacking forum. Obtained the month before, the data included 237k unique email addresses alongside names, dates of birth and salted SHA-256 password hashes.
Cl0p exploited CVE-2023-34362 in Progress Software's MOVEit Transfer to mass-extort over 2,700 organizations, including the BBC, British Airways, and the U.S. Department of Energy.
LockBit operators infiltrated parts of German auto-parts giant Continental AG's IT systems in August 2022. Containment was initially declared, but in November the group put 40 terabytes of stolen Continental data on its dark-web leak site, offered for sale or destruction for $50 million.
One hour before Russia's invasion of Ukraine, Sandworm operators deployed the AcidRain wiper against Viasat KA-SAT satellite modems, bricking ~30,000 European terminals and 5,800 German wind turbines and disabling Ukrainian military command-and-control.
In October 2021, data from the German fitness supplies store Fitmart was obtained and later redistributed online. The data included 214k unique email addresses accompanied by plain text passwords, allegedly "dehashed" from the original stored version.
REvil affiliates exploited a SQL injection zero-day in Kaseya's VSA remote-management platform to push ransomware to ~60 MSPs and through them to ~1,500 downstream organisations. The largest supply-chain ransomware attack on record.
The Clop ransomware gang breached German enterprise-software giant Software AG, demanded a $23 million ransom, forced internal systems offline, and leaked over a terabyte of stolen company and employee data after negotiations failed.
In December 2019, the now defunct German gaming website Go Ninja suffered a data breach that exposed 5M unique email addresses. The impacted data included usernames, email and IP addresses and salted MD5 password hashes.
In August 2019, the German Mastercard bonus program "Priceless Specials" suffered a data breach. Personal data on almost 90k program members was subsequently extensively circulated online and included names, email and IP addresses, phone numbers and partial credit card data.
In September 2018, the German social media website Knuddels suffered a data breach. The incident exposed 808k unique email addresses alongside usernames, real names, the city of the person and their password in plain text. Knuddels was subsequently fined €20k for the breach.
A destructive wiper disguised as ransomware, propagated via a compromised Ukrainian accounting software update. Estimated $10 billion in global damage — the most economically destructive cyberattack in history.
A North Korean ransomware worm that exploited the EternalBlue SMB vulnerability to spread to ~200,000 systems across 150 countries in 24 hours. Paralysed the U.K.'s NHS and crippled manufacturing globally.
A botched Mirai botnet campaign targeting a router exploit crashed roughly 900,000 Deutsche Telekom routers, knocking German customers offline for internet, phone, and TV over two days in November 2016.
Russian GRU Unit 26165 (APT28 / Fancy Bear) compromised the Bundestag's parliamentary network, exfiltrating ~16 GB of data including emails from Chancellor Merkel's parliamentary office. Forced a full Bundestag IT estate rebuild.
Attackers used spear-phishing to pivot from a German steel mill's office network into its production network, manipulating industrial controls so a blast furnace could not be shut down properly and suffered massive physical damage.