28.01.2026 • Topstories

Between War and Peace: Hybrid Attacks and Their Impact on Critical Infrastructure

FOCUS TOPIC GERMANY - Drone overflights at airports and Bundeswehr sites, digital espionage, covert influence operations and “disposable agents”: traditional military conflicts are increasingly being replaced by subtle, multilayered forms of threat. Since the beginning of Russia´s war against Ukraine, Germany has been confronted with a growing number of such incidents. Companies and operators of Critical Infrastructure now face the challenge of fundamentally transforming their security architectures. GIT SECURITY International spoke with Prof. Dennis‑Kenji Kipker, founder and Research Director of the Cyberintelligence Institute.

Prof. Dennis-Kenji Kipker,n founder and Research Director at Cyberintelligence.... — Prof. Dennis-Kenji Kipker,n founder and Research Director at Cyberintelligence. institute
© Cyberintelligence Institute

GIT SECURITY International: Professor Kipker, in recent times we often hear that the boundaries between peace and war are becoming increasingly blurred. What is your view on this?

Dennis‑Kenji Kipker: It describes the growing dissolution of traditional distinctions between clearly defined military conflicts and periods of formal peace. What is meant is that states and non-state actors deploy measures that are conflict‑oriented but deliberately remain below the threshold of an openly declared military attack. This includes covert, asymmetric, digital and psychologically effective methods that can be flexibly combined. This approach creates a grey zone in which civilian and military spheres overlap, exposing those affected to a permanent state of latent threat.

There have recently been several worrying cases of drone deployments – for example at the airports in Copenhagen and Munich. Could you give us a situational overview?