Germany wary of election hacks
Cyber defence on guard against fake news ahead of vote
BERLIN: As the clock ticks down to the elections on Sunday, Germany’s cyber defence nervously hopes it will be third time lucky after Russia was accused of meddling in the US and French votes.
But even if Berlin avoids a last-minute bombshell of leaks or online sabotage, it sees Moscow’s hand in fanning fears of Muslim migrants that are driving the rise of the hard-right.
Forecasters say that Chancellor Angela Merkel is almost certain to win.
But she will also face, for the first time in German post-war history, a right-wing populist and anti-immigration party that will have its own group on the opposition benches.
The Alternative for Germany (AfD) – which calls Merkel a “traitor” for her 2015 welcome to refugees – has been promoted, especially in Internet echo chambers, by far-right trolls and ultra-nationalists.
While mainstream media have treated the AfD with distaste, the most positive coverage has appeared in Kremlin-funded media such as RT and Sputnik, which have also heavily focused on migrant crime.
The London School of Economics (LSE) found that “official Russian media and unofficial pro-Russian trolls offer constant and repetitive support for the AfD and its anti-immigrant message,” wrote journalist Anne Applebaum, a participant in the monitoring project.
The AfD has actively courted the 2.5 million-strong Russian-German community with neighbourhood stands, flyer campaigns and a Russian-language YouTube channel.
Especially elderly and poor Russian-Germans have been receptive to xenophobic and anti-Muslim messages amid the 2015 mass migrant influx, said Berlin community leader Alexander Reiser.
“The fear was stoked by Russian TV, which presented it as a catastrophe of Europe being flooded by migrants,” he said, pointing also to Russians’ “traumatic memories” of the Soviet collapse and Russia’s wars against Islamic fundamentalists.
The risk of Moscow attempting to use Russian-Germans as pawns moved into the spotlight with the 2016 case of “Our Lisa”.
Russian media spread the story – quickly debunked by German police – of three Muslim men who raped a 13-year-old Russian-German girl, and of a subsequent cover-up by police and politicians.
It sparked Russian-German street protests that escalated into a toplevel diplomatic dispute between Berlin and Moscow.
Many Russian-Germans believed the conspiracy tale because they “projected their Russia experience onto the case,” said Reiser, who esti- mated that 15-20% were “stuck in a totalitarian way of thinking and will never fully understand democracy”.
A top-level government official said the Lisa case was Berlin’s “wake-up call” on Russian propaganda.
But Berlin’s biggest fear has focused on a massive 2015 malware attack that crippled the Bundestag parliamentary network for days.
It netted 17 gigabytes of data which officials feared could be used to blackmail MPs or discredit them — AFP