Foreign Spy Attacks Surge as AI Threatens German Firms

Germany’s digital association Bitkom has tracked data theft, industrial espionage and sabotage through its annual Economic Security survey since 2015. Foreign intelligence services, once a relatively minor suspected perpetrator, have risen sharply as state-backed hybrid operations target corporate data, technology and critical industries. Their emergence as the second-most cited attacker group, behind organized crime, matters because sophisticated, covert campaigns can be harder to identify and attribute, while artificial intelligence lowers the cost of tailoring phishing, impersonation and other attacks at scale.

Bitkom said on Aug. 26, 2026, that 37% of affected companies attributed at least one incident in the past year to a foreign intelligence service, up from 28% in 2025 and 7% in 2023. The representative survey covered 1,003 German companies. Among firms able to trace attacks geographically, 52% cited China and 49% Russia. Data theft, espionage and sabotage caused an estimated €211 billion to €270.8 billion in losses, with cyberattacks accounting for 76%. Meanwhile, 82% saw greater attacker use of AI, while damaging deepfake incidents doubled to 8% from 4%.