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The German government on Friday lashed out at Russian intelligence services for hacking email accounts belonging to Chancellor Olaf Scholz’s Social Democratic Party last year.
The infamous hacking group Fancy Bear, a part of Russia’s GRU military intelligence service, hacked the SDP, Annalena Baerbock, the country’s foreign minister, said early Friday.
It’s the latest intrusion showing how Moscow has actively disrupted European politics ahead of a crucial EU election next month. Capitals have been ramping up their rhetoric to try and stop Moscow from influencing political debate.
European authorities in March cracked down on a propaganda network with alleged ties to the Russian government and France called out a massive, Russia-orchestrated campaign to influence its politics last summer.
The Russian hacking group behind this week’s revelations, called APT28 or Fancy Bear, exploited an unknown Microsoft Outlook security vulnerability in December 2022 to compromise German socialist party officials’ email accounts, the German government said in a statement. The SPD revealed the cyberattack in 2023.
“This is completely unacceptable and will not remain without consequences,” Baerbock said.
A ministry spokesperson told reporters in Berlin that it had summoned Russia’s envoy over the incident.
The Czech Republic put out a statement Friday backing Germany’s claims and saying its intelligence services had found similar incidents of Fancy Bear intrusions of Czech institutions around the same time.
Czech Foreign Minister Jan Lipavský said in a statement that “Russia has long been trying to subvert democracy and the security of Czechia in various ways,” mentioning the recent revelations around propaganda platform Voice of Europe. “Pointing the finger publicly at a specific attacker in this way is an important tool for protecting national interests,” he said.
The European Union can impose sanctions against hacking groups. In 2020 it imposed a second round of cyber sanctions on Fancy Bear for its attacks on the German Bundestag in 2015.
The European Union’s top diplomat Josep Borrell in a statement “strongly condemn[ed] the malicious cyber campaign” by Fancy Bear against Germany and the Czech Republic. “The EU is determined to make use of the full spectrum of measures to prevent, deter and respond to Russia’s malicious behaviour in cyberspace,” Borrell said.
NATO also issued a statement backing Berlin and Prague, adding that allies of the defense alliance were “determined to employ the necessary capabilities in order to deter, defend against and counter the full spectrum of cyber threats to support each other, including by considering coordinated responses.”
Fancy Bear has regularly conducted cyberattacks against European government targets for years. So far, EU sanctions and diplomatic tussling have done little to deter them. Since the start of the war in Ukraine, European countries have suffered from increased cyber, disinformation and so-called “hybrid” attacks like sabotage, often with links to Russian government entities.
The European Parliament last year warned that Fancy Bear posed a “high” threat level to the EU institutions and agencies after it had been found targeting at least seven European governments with hacking campaigns, in a note by the EU’s cyber response unit, reported by POLITICO.
Jacopo Barigazzi contributed reporting.
