Author: Melissa Eddy / Source: New York Times
Personal information about hundreds of German politicians, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, was leaked by an anonymous Twitter account. None of those lawmakers were from the far-right party Alternative for Germany. Odd Andersen/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images
BERLIN — A 20-year-old German student took advantage of passwords as weak as “Iloveyou” and “1234” to hack into online accounts of hundreds of lawmakers and personalities whose political stances he disliked, officials revealed Tuesday, shaking Berlin’s political establishment and raising questions about data security in Europe’s leading economy.
Working from his computer in his parents’ home, the young man used relatively simple techniques to hack into successive accounts, the authorities said. There, he stole the users’ personal information and published it through Twitter over the course of December.
But it was not until late on Jan. 3 that an employee in the office of Andrea Nahles, leader of the center-left Social Democratic Party, finally noticed the hack and informed security officials, who then scrambled to track the source of the leaks.
At a time when Western officials are increasingly wary of digital interference in institutions and elections, and just months before European elections, the revelation of a widespread data breach that took a month to detect has prompted harsh assessments of the preparedness of a nation that for decades has prided itself on its technological prowess. The news that a single person, using unsophisticated methods, was responsible, only compounded those concerns.
On Tuesday, Chancellor Angela Merkel’s interior minister, Horst Seehofer, and senior security officials pushed back against accusations they had been too slow to respond or had failed in their mission to keep Germans safe online. They insisted they had organized a response within minutes of learning of the hack and said they had informed lawmakers about the risk of security breaches after a 2015 hack on the government network.
“This incident is painful, but our reaction shows the security of the German people is ensured around the clock, also in the cybersphere,” Mr. Seehofer told reporters.
Holger Münch, the head of Germany’s federal police, said the young man, whose identity was not released because he was being treated as a juvenile, had admitted during questioning to stealing the personal data of an array of public figures. Most of them are politicians, from all of Germany’s leading political parties — save for the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD.
“Based on our assessment so far, we believe he acted alone,” Mr. Münch told reporters, adding that so far, investigators had no evidence that the hacker had any affiliation with a political party or other groups. “He acted out of a general discontent with politicians, or journalists, or public figures, who he wanted to expose. That was his motive.”
The man was detained on Sunday on suspicion of spying and illegally publishing…
The post German Man Confesses to Hacking Politicians’ Data, Officials Say appeared first on FeedBox.