Beijing's spies cost German firms billions, says espionage expert
By Kate Connolly in Berlin
July 25, 2009 — 12.00am
GERMANY is under attack from an increasing number of state-backed Chinese spying operations that are costing its economy tens of billions of euros a year, a leading German counterintelligence agent has said.
Walter Opfermann, an expert on espionage protection in the office for counter-intelligence for the state of Baden-Wuerttemberg, said China was stealing industrial secrets using an array of "polished methods" from conventional spies and phone-tapping to the internet
Mr Opfermann said methods had become "extremely sophisticated" to the extent that China was now capable of "sabotaging whole chunks of infrastructure", such as Germany's power grid. "This poses a danger not just for Germany but for critical infrastructure worldwide," he said.
Russia was also "top of the list" of states using internet spying techniques to garner German expertise, which "helps save billions on their own economic research and development".
Russia had only "hundreds of thousands of agents", compared with China's 1 million, but it had "years more experience".
Mr Opfermann estimated that German companies were losing about €50 billion ($87 billion) and 30,000 jobs to industrial espionage every year.
The areas most under attack included car manufacturing, renewable energy, chemistry, communication, optics, X-ray technology, machinery and armaments. Information being gathered was related to not only research and development but also management techniques and marketing strategies.
Internet espionage was the area of biggest growth, Mr Opfermann said, citing the "thick fog of Trojan email attacks" taking place regularly against thousands of firms and the methods used to cover up where the emails came from.
"Old-fashioned" methods were also rife, such as phone-tapping, stealing laptops during business trips or Chinese companies that regularly sent spies to infiltrate companies.
"We've dealt with several cases of Chinese citizens on work experience in German companies who stole highly sensitive information from them," Mr Opfermann said.
In one case, a highly qualified Chinese mechanical engineer employed by a company in southern Germany was found to have passed on information for a machine it was developing to the company's Chinese competitor, who built an exact copy.
"As is often the case, the man disappeared and went back to China. So often the attacker is way ahead of the game and it's also hard to find out who they've been working for," Mr Opfermann said.
In 2007 the consultancy firm Corporate Trust estimated that about 20 per cent of German companies - mainly small and middle-sized ones - had been victims of industrial espionage.
Guardian News & Media
Most Viewed in World