BSI Warns Hackers Now Hit Pharma After Supermarkets
Pro-Russian groups claim responsibility without proof while Berlin officials quietly admit their critical infrastructure remains woefully unprepared.
Administrative Grief Correspondent
Berlin’s pharmacies are discovering that cyberwar comes with lousy customer service, and the BSI warning that hackers are hitting more than supermarkets landed in the city like a delayed delivery of insulin and ego. In Wedding, where every second storefront already looks one invoice away from collapse, pharmacists said the attack wave has turned a normally smug profession into a group therapy session with barcode scanners.
At a chemist near Leopoldplatz, a handwritten sign asked customers to be patient because some medicines could not be ordered normally. A woman in line said she had already visited two branches before noon. "They keep saying the system is down, but the system is always down when you need something serious," said Aylin Demir, who was waiting for asthma medication for her son. "For lip gloss and gummy vitamins, everything works perfectly."
That is the city’s favorite confidence trick: the more vital the service, the more it behaves like a bored civil servant after lunch. Pharmacy owners, who spent years selling themselves as the final civilized checkpoint before the meat grinder of digital life, now admit they bought protection the way lonely people buy cologne: expensive, overpromised, and mostly there to hide panic. The software came wrapped in soothing dashboards, pastel branding, and the kind of procurement-language perfume that makes a failing institution smell briefly like competence.
One district pharmacist, speaking on condition of anonymity because he still owes his IT contractor money and does not want a retaliatory invoice, said his store could survive a broken card terminal but not a week of missing stock data. "We were told the backups were cloud-based, which is apparently German for 'good luck,'" he said. "The vendors sold us resilience like a luxury accessory, then disappeared the second the counter stopped moving. They invoice confidence, then leave you alone with the mess and a dead screen."
The real humiliation belongs to the procurement class: the consultants, software resellers, and compliance courtiers who turned a basic public utility into a premium subscription to disappointment. They arrive with lanyards, jargon, and stern little slides about risk posture, then vanish back to their air-conditioned offices while pharmacists explain to patients that the medicine is not gone, merely administratively unavailable. It takes a special kind of professional cowardice to monetize safety and still leave the shelves naked.
Officials at the district office said they are "monitoring the situation," which in bureaucratic dialect means they have started a folder and are waiting for someone else to panic first. The BSI’s warning was broader: supermarkets, pharmacies, and other boring institutions that hold society together by sheer habit are now attractive targets because they are underfunded, overconfident, and run by people who still think a quarterly training video counts as defense.
By early evening, one Wedding pharmacy had run out of a commonly prescribed medicine and directed customers to check other branches. The next round of damage will not be measured in slogans or press releases, but in the queue of ordinary people told to come back later, while the people who sold the fantasy of security keep billing for uptime and calling the aftermath a learning opportunity.