Baden-Wuerttemberg
Union clashes with Home Secretary over cybersecurity
2/7/2023 9:07 am
Stuttgart (dpa / lsw) – After attacks on the website of the police in Baden-Württemberg, the police union and the state government are arguing about cyber security in the state. Union leader Ralf Kusterer accuses the state of failure: “The state and this state government are doing far too little and have been for years,” he told the “Stuttgarter Nachrichten” and the “Stuttgarter Zeitung” (Tuesday). According to Kusterer, the state authority IT Baden-Württemberg, which was pushed through by Prime Minister Winfried Kretschmann (Greens) in the first term of office, is a bad design that costs the departments a lot of money, but does not bring any operational orientation. The required performance was never achieved.
A spokesman for Interior Minister Thomas Strobl (CDU) called the criticism “completely unjustified”. It doesn’t stand up to a fact check. “The security measures took effect in the most recent overload attacks on countless German facilities, including the police website,” he said. The pages have been stabilized and only briefly taken offline to protect the system. The State Criminal Police Office also runs a central contact point for cybercrime, and each regional police headquarters has a specialized criminal inspectorate for cybercrime. There is also a course with a focus on cybercrime at the Baden-Württemberg Police University.
At the end of January, the police website was sometimes unavailable for hours because the authorities had shut down the server as a precaution following the attack. At that time, there had been cyber attacks on several facilities throughout Germany.
