Germany: IT and Internet

The European Central Bank has issued an urgent directive to major financial institutions requiring comprehensive action plans to counter rapidly evolving cybersecurity threats powered by frontier artificial intelligence models. With an October 2026 deadline looming, banks must demonstrate concrete measures across vulnerability management, monitoring capabilities, and third-party risk controls as AI-enabled attacks compress the timeline between threat discovery and exploitation. This supervisory escalation s

The European Patent Office's Technical Board of Appeal examined whether a patent application for targeted advertisements with video recording functionality meets inventive step requirements. The decision analyzes how authentication performed by different entities and adding service options to advertisements relate to technical and non-technical features under patent law.

A European patent application for a method of estimating departure times for scheduled events was refused by the Technical Board of Appeal. The Board found that effects resulting from modified business schemes cannot contribute to technical character, and that inherent effects from computer implementation are insufficient without achieving a "further" technical effect beyond normal computational processes.

The EU's IT security offensive has been given a new building block: On December 10, 2024, the EU Cyber Resilience Act ("CRA") came into force.

As evidenced on 19 July 2024 major IT outages, including those caused by a simple yet apparently defective "content update", can quickly cascade into systemic cyber incidents...

The EU Accessibility Act will improve accessibility for millions of Europeans in the physical and digital world, requiring companies to put in place a range of accessibility measures.

The EU Commission considers intervening in the commercial relationship between large Content and Application Providers (CAPs) and Internet Access Providers (ISPs)...

MCU (microcontroller unit) is the semiconductors category with the highest lead time.

The dangers in the area of cybercrime have been steadily increasing for years. The risks range from data theft and espionage to IT failures and production stoppages.