Germany accused Russia this Friday of a cyber attack against the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) of Chancellor Olaf Scholz, carried out by hackers in January 2023, and warned that there will be consequences. “We can now clearly attribute last year’s attack to the Russian group APT28, controlled by the Russian military intelligence service GRU,” said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock during a press conference in Adelaide, Australia.
“In other words, Russian state hackers have attacked Germany in cyberspace; “This is absolutely unacceptable and will have consequences,” said Baerbock during her visit to Australia to meet with his counterpart, Penny Wong.
The SPD had reported the cyberattack in the summer of 2023, explaining that hackers had taken advantage of a security breach in the Microsoft operating system to access email accounts of the leaders of the social democratic formation. The federal investigation in this regard – carried out by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – has just ended, Minister Baerbock stated, without giving further details.
The Russian hacker group APT28, also known as Fancy Bear and linked to Russian military intelligence GRU, is suspected of being responsible for dozens of cyberattacks around the world, and is suspected of being linked to Russian military intelligence (GRU). ). In early 2023, Berlin said that Russian activist hackers had taken several German websites offline – although with little tangible effect – amid debate over the shipment of German Leopard tanks to Ukraine.
Already in 2023, the cybersecurity agency of the European Union (EU) took note of the cyber attack on the SPD, and validated that there were “concrete signs” of Russian origin. Cyberattacks and espionage by Moscow are one of Brussels’ concerns in these weeks prior to the elections to the European Parliament, which will be held between June 6 and 9.
This same APT28 group is also suspected of being the author of the cyberattack on the computer systems of the Bundestag (lower house of the German Parliament) in 2015, on the server of the American Democratic Party in 2016 and against Emmanuel Macron’s presidential campaign in France in the 2017.
Last March, Germany’s cybersecurity agency and researchers working for Alphabet, which owns Google, said that a similar group, called APT29, had been discovered targeting several German political parties, with the aim of infiltrating their networks and steal data.
