The Agence nationale de la sécurité des systèmes d’information (ANSSI) and the Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik (BSI) present their first “Common situational picture”

ANSSI and its counterpart in Germany, the BSI, have shared years of intense and regular cooperation in order to strengthen the cybersecurity in France, Germany and within the whole European digital space. The “Common situational picture” is the first joint report on a shared threat for companies and citizens across the border: malicious activities associated to ransomware and crypto mining.

Publié le 19 Juillet 2018 Mis à jour le 19 Juillet 2018

The consequences of cyber incidents often extend the borders of a single country, thus making international cooperation a key priority for cybersecurity agencies. The “Common situational picture” is a joint report that aims to demonstrate ANSSI’s and BSI’s willingness to improve their common communication and face together the growing challenges, which occur consequently in a more digitalized, connected world. Released upon an annual year basis, the report will focus on a different subject based on the threat landscape the agencies are sharing analysis on.

For this first edition, ANSSI and BSI chose to focus on malicious activities associated to ransomware and crypto mining which represented a growing threat from citizens to major companies providing critical services and going through small and medium-sized enterprises with direct impact on their activities. The uncontrolled proliferation of sophisticated attack tools make those attacks more dangerous, leading to campaigns of attacks, the consequences of which can be disastrous.

In their common analysis, both agencies agree that the threat situation concerning Ransomware is still alarming, even more than two years after the first Ransomware attacks became public. The impact, however, is different in France and Germany, especially regarding the global WannaCry and NotPetya ransomware campaigns in 2017. These different experiences regarding the consequences of the same attacks in the two countries emphasize the need to cooperate even closer, e.g. by sharing information and jointly analyzing cyber threats.

 

Guillaume Poupard, ANSSI General Director, stated that "the sole improvement of national cyber security capacities, in France as in Germany, is indeed not sufficient to counterbalance the threat level we face, which, from this point of view, requires to merge even more our efforts."

Arne Schönbohm, BSI president, added that "cyberspace has no borders, we are facing international threats. Thus, our response to the challenges of digitalization must be international. With regard to cybersecurity France and Germany have been pioneers and trendsetters in Europe. The common analysis of the cyber threat landscape creates synergies and makes us even stronger. Moreover, the intense cooperation with our French partner agency ANSSI reflects the close cooperation between Germany and France that the federal government has agreed on in their coalition agreement, especially in the context of the plans to renew the Élysée treaty."