No other country in the European Union is targeted by criminal hackers more than Germany, which also ranks fourth worldwide for the highest number of cyberattacks, Microsoft said on Thursday.
The US tech giant’s Digital Defence Report 2025 found that 3.3% of global cyberattacks in the first half of 2025 were directed against targets in Germany.
Only the United States, which accounts for nearly one in four attacks (24.8%), the United Kingdom with 5.8% and Israel at 3.5% see more hacking attempts, Microsoft said.
Hackers are usually interested in financial gain, not traditional espionage, the company found.
More than half of cyberattacks (52%) involved ransomware to extort money from companies, individuals or institutions.
Attacks for spying purposes made up only 4% of cases.
“Threats from state actors remain a serious and persistent danger. However, most of the direct attacks facing organizations today are from common criminals looking to make a profit,” said a Microsoft spokesman.
According to the report, the greatest danger in cyberspace comes from hackers from Russia, China, North Korea and Iran.
Russia uses hacker groups primarily to attack Ukraine and NATO member states, while North Korea and Iran are mainly concerned with using ransomware attacks to extort money for state purposes.
North Korean IT experts working in the West are also a major problem.
For over a decade, North Korea has been secretly infiltrating tens of thousands of workers to work remotely in companies and organizations around the world.
“This growing army of employees transfers hundreds of millions of dollars to North Korea every year. When discovered, some of these workers turn to extortion, another method of raising money for the regime.”
In classic attacks, hackers primarily try to obtain access data to user accounts. The attackers mainly use phishing emails to trick victims into entering their access data on a fake system.
The experts at Microsoft point out that 99.9% of these attacks can be fended off with multi-factor authentication (MFA).
When logging in with MFA, users must provide a second form of proof in addition to their password.
This can be a text message or app confirmation on the mobile phone – or a fingerprint or face scan. The “second factor” protects account access, even if the hackers know the password.
