The “Alternative for Germany” party apparently has an IT security problem: A massive data breach that has now come to light exposed extensive internal communications.
heise online took an initial look at the 280 GB dataset. It contains 420,000 emails from 10 mailboxes, including those of the Federal Arbitration Court, several prominent AfD members, and the party’s federal headquarters. The archive also includes just over 41,000 PDFs, 3,480 DOCX files, and several SQL database dumps. Guides for journalists offer tips on promising avenues for investigation, such as possible financial irregularities. The party is suspected of right-wing extremism. It is unclear whether the data breach contains new ammunition that would make a ban proceeding more likely.
Several web servers and at least one mail server apparently were the source of the unauthorized copies of data now made public. Along with email addresses, they contain many other details AfD officials and their contacts. In addition to releasing the entire dataset as a BitTorrent download, the attackers who targeted AfD communications also published the contents of the leak on a website, where they made it searchable. Mirko Ross of IT security firm Asvin examined the breach. He told heise online: “This doesn’t look like an insider job to me, but rather hacktivism.”
According to an alleged statement from the attackers quoted in a Telegram channel, their goal was “not destruction,” since they could have destroyed both the servers and the backups. Instead, they said, they wanted to expose the party’s “degeneracy and hypocrisy.” The anonymous whistleblowers said they got in through an “outdated website.” The hacktivists told “International Cyber Digest” that they were later offered money to take down the leak website and were hit with a distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attack.
The AfD confirmed the incident, saying that mailboxes hosted by a service provider — mostly old, unused ones — were stolen in September. The party said it stopped the attack after discovering it. But the published data, which run through early September, contradict that account: They apparently include, among other things, communications the campaign for the state election in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. The affected mailboxes apparently include that of Leif-Erik Holm, the AfD’s top candidate in Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania.
This article was originally published in German . It was translated with technical assistance and editorially reviewed before publication.
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