Germany yesterday accused Russia of a cyberattack against Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), carried out by hackers in January 2023, and warned that there would be consequences. “We can now clearly attribute last year’s attack to the Russian group APT28, which is controlled by the Russian military intelligence service, GRU,” Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock said 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”, assured Baerbock during the visit to Australia to meet with the counterpart, Penny Wong.
The SPD had reported the cyber attack in the summer of 2023, explaining that the hackers had taken advantage of a security breach in the Microsoft operating system to access the email accounts of the leaders of the social democratic formation. The federal investigation into the matter – carried out by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – has just ended, said Minister Baerbock, without giving further details.
Just yesterday, his ministry summoned the charge d’affaires of the Russian embassy in Berlin to convey to him that the German government “will not tolerate cyberattacks and will use the full spectrum of available measures” to prevent aggressive behavior that they come from Moscow, Christian Wagner, a spokesman for Foreign Affairs, said at a regular press conference.
The incident “shows that the Russian threat to peace and security in Europe is real”, remarked Wagner. According to Maximilian Kall, a spokesman for the Ministry of the Interior, this is “solid information” that is in the power of the German Government and other allied countries.
The Russian hacker group APT28, also known as Fancy Bear, is suspected of being responsible for dozens of cyber attacks around the world and is believed to be linked to Russian military intelligence, the GRU. Already in 2023, the computer security 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. Cyber ??attacks and espionage by Moscow are one of the concerns of Brussels these weeks before the elections to the European Parliament, which are held between June 6 and 9. “The European Union is determined to use the full range of measures to prevent, stop and respond to Russia’s malicious behavior in cyberspace,” said yesterday in a statement the head of European diplomacy, Josep Borrell, with reference to the revelation german
The same group, APT28, 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 the presidential campaign of Emmanuel Macron in France in 2017. In March, the German cybersecurity agency and researchers working for Google-owner Alphabet said a similar group, called APT29, had been discovered targeting political parties to infiltrate their networks and steal data.
