Private details of hundreds of German politicians appear online

Private details of hundreds of German politicians, including credit card details and pictures of IDs, have been revealed via a Twitter account. It is not clear how the people behind the account got the data.

This mainly concerns data from politicians of all German political parties, with the exception of the AfD. Chancellor Merkel’s email addresses, fax numbers and letters have also been revealed. According to the German RBB, this also concerned internal party documents and communications, copies of identity documents, letters and invoices, but also private chats and credit card details from the family circle of the persons concerned. In addition, there were data from artists, YouTube acquaintances and journalists, according to Der Spiegel. The oldest material is from 2012, the newest from November 2018.

Much of the data was distributed via links in Twitter posts in December, in the form of a sort of Advent calendar, according to the rbb. But even before that, since the summer of 2017, the account would have released data from politicians without the media picking it up. The account would have sixteen thousand followers and belong to an undisclosed internet platform, whose operator is said to be located in Hamburg. The data is distributed as text files and videos via the DTube platform.

It is still unclear how the people behind the account obtained the data. The German Bundesamt für Sicherheit in der Informationstechnik and the Bundesamt für Verfassungsschutz are investigating the matter, but report that the Bundestag network has not been affected. According to Bild, the services have asked the NSA for help with the investigation. According to Bild, there are further indications that access to the political data was via Outlook. The criminals are said to have learned the passwords of at least 30 politicians, who then used them when trying to log into social media accounts.

according to security researcher the grugq This is a data breach in which criminals have put a lot of work into it. The distribution is said to have taken place via dozens of download links with multiple mirrors each and 161 mirrors of the data files themselves. This would prevent the criminals from making the data inaccessible. It would also be very detailed information. A journalist from Bild claims that the first attempts at data collection from politicians already took place in 2009 and that there are indications that the perpetrators have much more compromising information.