SFor weeks there has been an atmosphere of alarm in Vahrenwalder Strasse in Hannover, where the automotive supplier Continental have its headquarter. After hackers stole around 40 terabytes of the group’s data in a single attack, a volume that corresponds to around 260 million pages of documents, the internal investigation is in full swing. Supervisory boards want to know how critical the information that was diverted is. So far, there is still very little clarity, says an inspector. The committee got a first interim result last week at a special meeting. Until the next regular meeting on December 14, more responses will now be received.

The most important and – according to all that is known – the only clue is provided by a list that the hacker group “Lockbit 3.0” published on a blog on the dark web. Millions of lines list files that were allegedly copied from Conti systems, from technical sketches to customer correspondence to employee personal information. In painstaking detail, the car supplier’s specialists are now searching for the original files on their own computers and on network computers. Open each one and try to assess the danger if it falls into the wrong hands. According to information from the FAZ, they have the support of the auditing company KPMG.