Attorney General: Hacker Attack Procedure | tagesschau.de



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Status: 09.09.2021 4:19 p.m.

Hackers have been sending fake emails to German politicians for months. The federal government blames Russia for the cyber attacks. Now the federal prosecutor is officially investigating.

By Florian Flade, WDR, and Hakan Tanriverdi, BR

Some of the emails look deceptively real. As if they came from T-Online or GMX. The hackers want to use them to steal passwords and access data and thus gain access to their victims’ e-mail inboxes.

Numerous German politicians, the majority of whom are members of the state parliaments, but also members of the Bundestag, have received such emails in the past few months. German security authorities are sure that there are no cyber criminals behind this wave of attacks. They suspect that it is an espionage operation by the Russian military intelligence service GRU. The flood of emails is said to be part of a cyber attack campaign called “ghostwriter” that has already surfaced in other European countries such as Poland and Lithuania.

According to information from WDR and BR the Attorney General has now initiated an investigation into this case because of the “ghostwriter” attacks. The suspicion is that these are hacker attacks for which a “foreign power”, in this case Russia, is held responsible. First the “Spiegel” reported about it.

“The federal government has reliable knowledge on the basis of which the ‘ghostwriting’ activities can be assigned to cyber actors of the Russian state and specifically to the Russian military intelligence service GRU,” said a spokeswoman for the Foreign Office at the beginning of the week. The spokeswoman said the procedure was unacceptable.

In a conversation between State Secretary Miguel Berger and a Deputy Russian Foreign Minister, the “ghostwriter” operation was discussed. “The German government urges the Russian government to stop these illegal cyber activities with immediate effect,” said the spokeswoman for the Federal Foreign Office. Two people unanimously reported that the Russian reaction was to reporters WDR and BR, not satisfactory from a German point of view. Before that, at the end of August, the “intensity” of the “ghostwriter” campaign had once again increased significantly, in other words: a lot of phishing emails were probably sent. Some of them were probably successful, so the e-mail accounts were compromised, which means that the hackers gained access to the content.

The Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV) had repeatedly compiled its findings on the “ghostwriter” campaign and finally submitted a certificate to the public prosecutors at the Federal Public Prosecutor’s Office in Karlsruhe. This should show that there is a high probability of attacks by the Russian military intelligence service GRU in order to collect information about German politicians and possibly discredit the victims.

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