2024-05-03 12:45:15
A hacker attack on the SPD is said to have been organized by Russia. According to Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock, the GRU secret service is behind it.
The federal government blames a unit of the Russian military intelligence service GRU for a cyber attack on the SPD at the beginning of last year. “Russian state hackers have attacked Germany in cyberspace,” said Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Friday during her visit to Australia in Adelaide.
According to Baerbock, the federal government’s investigations, led by the Foreign Office, have now been completed. “Today we can clearly attribute this attack from last year to the APT28 group, which is controlled by the Russian secret service GRU,” said the Green politician. “This is completely unacceptable and will not go without consequences.”
Hackers exploited security gap
“It cannot be ruled out that there was an outflow of data from individual email inboxes,” said an SPD spokeswoman in June last year when the attack became public. According to the spokeswoman, a single-digit number of mailboxes were affected.
According to Microsoft, Russian actors exploited the security gap, it said. The SPD investigated the attack with the Federal Office for Information Security and the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution immediately after it became known in April.
When the incident was announced, SPD General Secretary Kevin Kühnert stated that there was solid evidence that attackers from Russia had carried out the attack.