Germany votes to let its spies hack and sabotage foreign targets

The German parliament has passed landmark legislation granting its intelligence agencies sweeping new offensive cyber powers. The law allows Germany's foreign intelligence service (BND) to actively hack foreign systems, sabotage adversary supply chains (like drone factories), and take down servers run by state-sponsored hacking groups, moving beyond mere intelligence gathering. The domestic security agency (BfV) also gains limited powers to block or reroute data traffic within Germany.

This represents the most significant overhaul of Germany's postwar spy laws, shifting from a defensive posture to a proactive one in response to heightened threats, particularly from Russia. For engineers and security professionals, this signals a new era where state-backed cyber operations become a more overt tool of national policy. The law also formally authorizes the use of AI for mass data analysis and biometric image matching. Germany is now aligning its cyber capabilities with other major European powers, fundamentally changing how it responds to covert attacks.