Almost 48 hours after the momentous sabotage of rail traffic on Saturday morning, there is no confession. That speaks against left-wing extremists as perpetrators. Investigations are now going in all directions, including those of state actors. Security experts consider it conceivable that the action was just a test run.
According to IT security experts, the targeted sabotage of Deutsche Bahn's cable network could have been a test. "It could only have been a test run to see the effects of such sabotage," said Michael Wiesner, spokesman for the expert panel working group Critical Infrastructures (AG Kritis) the newspapers of the Funke media group.
The two cables severed in Berlin and Herne showed "that this is a coordinated approach," according to the AG Kritis spokesman and IT security consultant. The perpetrators would have had information about the routing, the GSM-R system and the consequences of a failure. "In any case, this suggests a high degree of criminal energy and extensive preparation," Wiesner continued.
In addition to a possible test run, a connection with the alleged sabotage of the Nord Stream 1 and 2 gas pipelines or with the destruction of the Crimean bridge is also conceivable, said Wiesner. The time could also have been chosen explicitly, for example due to major events such as the AfD demonstration in Berlin or the Bundesliga soccer games at the weekend.
This year, AG Kritis registered an increase in cyber attacks, for example in the energy sector. "Since the Ukraine war, it has also become increasingly clear that armed conflicts are increasingly based on 'hybrid warfare', i.e. traditional operations that are accompanied and supported by cyber attacks," said Wiesner.
Targeted sabotage at Deutsche Bahn paralyzed train traffic in large parts of northern Germany on Saturday morning. The railway stopped almost all train traffic in Lower Saxony, Bremen, Hamburg and Schleswig-Holstein for around three hours. In Berlin, state security at the State Criminal Police Office (LKA) has now taken over the investigation. The "Bild" newspaper reported on Sunday that the Federal Criminal Police Office (BKA) considered state sabotage to be conceivable in an internal assessment. BKA and the Federal Ministry of the Interior did not comment on the report when asked. The fact that no claim has been made so far speaks against perpetrators from the left-wing extremist scene who have claimed responsibility for attacks against the railway in the past.
The expert on terrorism and geopolitics Peter Neumann considers a Russian attack on the critical infrastructure in Germany to be possible. "Russia has an interest in causing panic in Europe and signaling that it can paralyze life very violently," said the scientist RTL. It takes significant knowledge to attack these nodes. However, there is of course no clear evidence. "Right now it's still a theory."
