From cyber attack to safety award

13 October 2019: Pilz is at a stand­still fol­lowing a hacker attack. Data on servers and com­puters around the world has been encrypted to exact a ransom. But the com­pany imme­di­ately switches gears. With agile methods and thanks to the employees’ tremen­dous ded­i­ca­tion, Pilz quickly recov­ered. The com­pany is open about the attack, reg­u­larly informing its employees and the public. Pilz received the Baden-Würt­tem­berg safety award this year for its exem­plary crisis com­mu­ni­ca­tion.

Outstanding openness

Thomas Strobl, ­Dig­i­tal­i­sa­tion Min­ister and Deputy Min­ister Pres­i­dent of Baden- Würt­tem­berg, and Min­ister of Eco­nomic Affairs Dr Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut pre­sented the award to Thomas Pilz. “An authentic and open han­dling of a cyber attack is absolutely nec­es­sary to suc­cess­fully take action against this type of crime,” praised Thomas Strobl. “A strong aware­ness among our com­pa­nies for safety mat­ters is more impor­tant than ever to main­tain and strengthen the eco­nomic suc­cess of our state.” The threat to data and exper­tise has unfor­tu­nately become a con­stant com­panion in com­pany processes. And yet, the topic is still fre­quently under­es­ti­mated. The safety award is meant to raise com­pa­nies’ aware­ness of these risks and pro­mote the inno­va­tion poten­tial in this area,” added Dr Nicole Hoffmeister-Kraut.

From the very begin­ning, Pilz openly com­mu­ni­cated about the hacker attack to cus­tomers and the public in order to raise aware­ness about the dan­gers of cyber attacks. Thomas Pilz in ­par­tic­ular has given many talks on the topic since then and has sup­ported and advised other com­pa­nies affected by this. While receiving the award, he expressly thanked the law enforce­ment per­forming the inves­ti­ga­tion for their ­sup­port. He also men­tioned the work of the Pilz employees who gave their all to ensure that the com­pany made it through those dark days.

2nd place was awarded to Porsche AG, the energy provider EnBW Energie Baden-Würt­tem­berg and col­lec­tively the trans­port and logis­tics com­pa­nies SVG Süd and smartSEC.