The German Federal Foreign Ministry called the chargé d’affaires of the Russian embassy in Berlin for consultations this Friday after holding Moscow responsible for the cyber attacks suffered by the headquarters of the governmental German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and several German companies.
The incident shows that “the Russian threat to security and peace in Europe is real and enormous,” said a spokesman for the German ministry when announcing the obligatory appointment for Alexei Korliakov, vice ambassador. The SPD made the attack public in June of last year, after verifying that third parties had had illegal access to the emails of several of its leaders.
“We can clearly attribute that attack to the ‘APT28’ group, which is led by Russia’s military secret services GRU. In other words, ‘hackers’ at the service of the Russian State have attacked Germany in cyberspace,” said Berlin’s head of diplomacy, Annalena Baerbock, during an official trip to Australia. That attack is “absolutely unacceptable” and “will not go without consequences,” Baerbock said.
The charge d’affaires of the embassy of the Russian Federation in Berlin is summoned almost regularly to the German ministry to receive a scolding, the last time after the arrest of two Germans of Russian origin whom Moscow accuses of espionage.
The ‘APT28’ group, also known under the pseudonym “Fancy Bear”, has been systematically attacking several companies in the arms and military sector in Germany, but also energy and logistics firms, for years.
Hackers
Different Western intelligence services consider this hacker organization, active since at least 2004, one of the arms of Russian espionage and since 2020 it has been subject to sanctions by the European Union. In Germany it has so far carried out several relevant computer attacks, including one in 2015 on the servers of the Bundestag, the federal Parliament.
This hostile action forced the entire computer system of the German lower house to be isolated from the network for several days. Then Russian hackers managed to access the parliamentary email service through fake messages allegedly sent from the United Nations.
After breaking into the Bundestag’s internal network, the hackers stole at least 16 gigabytes of reserved data. Those responsible for German counterespionage consider that the ‘APT28’ group is one of “the most active and dangerous cyber actors in the world”, also responsible for numerous disinformation and propaganda campaigns.
The federal Minister of the Interior, the social democrat Nancy Faeser, announced, for her part, that Germany will confront these cyber attacks with all its means. “In no way are we going to allow ourselves to be intimidated by the Russian regime,” said Faeser, who stressed that “we will continue to massively support Ukraine, which is only defending itself from Putin’s murderous war.” Specialists from counterespionage, intelligence services and German military secret services participated in the investigation of the computer attack against the SPD.
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