German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock on Friday said Berlin blames a unit of the Russian military intelligence service GRU for a 2023 cyber attack on the centre-left Social Democrats (SPD).
“Russian state hackers attacked Germany in cyberspace,” Baerbock said in Adelaide during a visit to Australia, adding there would be consequences.
In June 2023, the SPD, the dominant party in Germany’s ruling coalition, said that email accounts belonging to its executive had been the target of a cyber attack earlier that year.
According to the SPD, this was made possible by a security vulnerability in software which was not known at the time of the attack. “It cannot be ruled out that data was leaked from individual email inboxes,” a SPD spokesperson said.
According to Baerbock, the German government’s investigation into the matter, led by the Foreign Office, has now been concluded.
“We can now clearly attribute this attack from last year to the APT28 group, which is controlled by the Russian secret service GRU,” said Baerbock. “This is completely unacceptable and will not be without consequences.”
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