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by aagd 2429 days ago
Being from Germany I never heard about government based security checks. IT-wise our government doesn't make a very competent impression. Do you have any background info on this?
4 comments

I remember receiving an email from the BSI ("Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik"; engl. "Federal Office for Security of Information Technology") regarding a misconfigured NTP server that could be abused for NTP reflection attacks.

The functions of the BSI are explained in English here [1] based on the following law [2]. I guess initiatives such as informing about the NTP problem fall into what is listed under §3.2.

[1] https://www.bsi.bund.de/EN/TheBSI/Functions/functions_node.h...

[2] https://www.bsi.bund.de/SharedDocs/Downloads/DE/BSI/BSI/bsig...

They pretty quickly send you emails once your email comes up in the whois of a domain that’s pointing to an IP in the allocation space of German companies.

Example: hetzner.

The German government has contributed the base layer to OpenStreetMaps, and uses it for their official parcel/lot line maps. It is much better than the janky pile of crap Esri dumps on most counties in the USA.