The new hacking reports follow last year's diplomatic spat between Berlin and Moscow over allegations that ‘Russian state agencies' were involved in a 2015 hack attack on the Bundestag in 2015. That attack led to a tit-for-tat exchange of sanctions and entry bans.
The German Foreign Ministry has expressed concern over new reports of hacking ‘by Russia-linked' actors, saying that it would await the results of a formal investigation before making any “conclusions” or announcing countermeasures.
The Ministry's statement follows reports by German media late last week alleging that seven Bundestag MPs and 31 members of regional parliaments had been affected by a hacking blamed on Russia's GRU military intelligence agency.
According to Spiegel magazine, hackers belonging to a hacking campaign known as ‘the Ghostwriters', supposedly linked to the GRU, targetted politicians belonging to Chancellor Angela Merkel's Christian Democratic Union (CDU) and its grand coalition partner – the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), as well as several dozen activists. The hack attack reportedly worked by using phishing emails.
It's not clear whether any data has been leaked.
Unnamed “security authorities” told Spiegel that the same group was behind the Bundestag hack of 2015, which reportedly led to the theft of over 16 gb of data from a parliament computer. Last year, German prosecutors issued an arrest warrant for a Russian…
