The first signs were the computers and cell phones suddenly slowing down; In addition, they were both temporarily unable to send emails: As early as winter 2021, the Danish MPs Katarina Ammitzbøll and Uffe Elbæk became suspicious that they might have been victims of a hacker attack. Since this Tuesday they have been certain: it was probably the Chinese state that was targeting them and all other members of the international China-critical politician network Ipac (Inter-Parliamentary Alliance on China). The network sent a corresponding message to all its members.
Ammitzbøll said he was “deeply shocked”. about the fact that the Danish state had already been warned in 2022 that she and Elbæk had been victims of this attack. As a result, neither the authorities contacted nor Mette Frederiksen’s government considered it necessary to contact those affected. “I am very concerned that one cannot count on the protection of the members of the Folketinget or parliamentary work,” the newspaper quoted Policies Katarina Ammitzbøll, who at the time sat in parliament for the Conservatives, but has since switched to the Moderates. Uffe Elbaek is the founder of the Alternativet party and former culture minister. The two parliamentarians invited Hong Kong democracy activist Ted Hui to Denmark in December 2020. Hui then applied for political asylum in Great Britain and now lives in Australia.
The group is said to have been spying on its targets for years
With the debate about espionage from China in full swing in Germany following the arrest of four suspected agents last week, Denmark now also has its own scandal. The Danish case is actually just the latest twist in a major espionage case that is occupying security authorities from the USA to New Zealand.
A hacker gang with connections to Chinese state security, which goes by the name “Advanced Persistent Threat 31” (APT 31) in security circles, has apparently been spying on politicians, companies and critics in the West for years. In 2021, the hackers then targeted all Ipac members. According to the FBI, APT31 sent a total of 1,000 emails to 400 different accounts connected to Ipac. The recipients come from twelve EU countries, the USA, Great Britain, Canada and Ukraine. Most are members of parliament in their countries, but some also belong to the EU Parliament.
To attack the politicians, fake emails were used with tracking links that were activated as soon as someone opened the email. The hackers attempted to obtain IP addresses, browser types and operating system information, a proven strategy for orchestrating further attacks.
German MPs only found out that they were affected when they were accused in the USA
The case shows how differently authorities and governments deal with such warnings. At the end of March, the USA issued indictments against seven suspected APT 31 members and, together with Great Britain, placed two suspects on sanctions lists. The Finnish authorities issued a press statement back in March 2021 that the Chinese group had attempted to break into the Finnish parliamentary network and was now being investigated for serious espionage. In Lithuania, Belgium and Switzerland, the affected MPs were informed directly about the attacks.
Other European governments, however, have so far only responded with silence. This was also the case in Germany, where the accounts of the human rights policy spokesman for the Union faction in the Bundestag, Michael Brand (CDU), and his then Green Party colleague Margarete Bause were attacked. According to their own statements, they also only found out about the attack through the US prosecution.
Reinhard Bütikofer, who has been a member of the EU Parliament for the Greens since 2009, also recently received confirmation that he was the target of the attacks. “The FBI informed German authorities about the hacker attack on German parliamentarians as early as 2022,” said Bütikofer Picture-Newspaper. He is very surprised that this information was withheld from him and the other people affected, including Engin Eroglu from the Free Voters. Bütikofer, co-chair of Ipac, along with other European critics of China, was banned from travel by the Chinese government in 2021 in retaliation for EU sanctions related to human rights abuses in Xinjiang.