The Cyber Threat To Germany's Elections Is Very Real
One afternoon in early September, a small group of journalists, policy makers, and visitors in Berlin gathered for a lunch panel discussion, titled “Who’s hacking the election—how do we stop the attackers?” Hans-Georg Maassen, the head of the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution (BfV), Germany’s domestic-security agency, was the guest of honor. In his remarks, he warned of the dangers of what’s known as “white propaganda”: information illegally collected and disseminated by hackers with the intent of manipulating public opinion against the German government and disrupting its upcoming parliamentary elections. “We and our partners are of the opinion that the background [of the hack on the Democratic National Committee] in the U.S. was Russian,” he said. Russian military intelligence, his office alleged, was very likely responsible for hacking and leaking top DNC officials’ emails during the 2016 campaign season, exposing sensitive internal-party communications that drove a wedge through the party. Maassen warned that a cyber attack on the German government now, so close to the country’s vote on September 24th, remained a possibility.
Such a hack would not be new. Two; in the months that followed, further Chancellor Angela Merkel’s Christian Democratic Union of Germany (CDU), the foreign ministry, and the finance ministry. The breaches were blamed on the Kremlin-linked hacking unit APT28, or Fancy Bear, the tied to the DNC hack and the cyber attack in France on the campaign of President Emmanuel Macron just days before the country’s election.
