Enlarge image
Federal Prosecutor's Office in Karlsruhe
Photo: Christoph Schmidt / dpa
Federal Prosecutor General Peter Frank is investigating a large-scale cyberattack campaign in Russia before the federal election.
A spokesman for the Karlsruhe authority confirmed this to SPIEGEL.
For months, hackers from the "ghostwriters" group have been trying to gain access to private e-mail accounts of members of the Bundestag and Landtag with so-called phishing emails.
The German security authorities are convinced that the Russian military intelligence service GRU is behind the attacks.
Above all, politicians from the Union and the SPD are said to have been targeted.
The President of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, Thomas Haldenwang, warned in July that personal information could be stolen from the attacks and later used for fake news and dirty campaigns - the group has already proceeded similarly in Poland and the Baltic States.
In 2015, the Russian secret service GRU hacked the Bundestag network
Despite several warnings from the Germans in direct talks with Russia, the hacker campaign is said to have become even more intense recently.
That is why the Foreign Office went public on Monday with an exceptionally sharp statement.
"The German government urges the Russian government to stop these illegal cyber activities with immediate effect," said a spokeswoman.
The Federal Foreign Office also named for the first time who the German government blames for the hacker attacks: the Russian military intelligence service GRU, which hacked the Bundestag network in 2015.
The government regards this "unacceptable approach as a threat to the security of the Federal Republic of Germany and to the democratic decision-making process."
The security authorities have already informed the Bundestag at least three times this year about cyber attacks by foreign secret services on parliamentarians.
"Ghostwriter" hackers hijacked a Polish politician's Twitter account
In a letter dated June 24, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution and the Federal Office for Information Security warned: "In view of the upcoming federal election in 2021, the Office for the Protection of the Constitution is currently observing that intelligence attacks against party members are intensifying." »To publish personal and intimate information or even fabricated fake news«.
The fears are also fed by experiences from the Baltic states, where a fabricated message was placed about the alleged desecration of a Jewish cemetery in Lithuania by German soldiers.
Incidents in Poland also made the counterintelligence services in this country sit up and take notice. There, hackers from the "ghostwriter" group took over, among other things, the Twitter account of a politician from the ruling PiS party and published intimate photos of a party friend - a modern form of character assassination.