Politicians’ data is posted online

At first sight... no sensitive data are included in what was published.

Chancellor Angela Merkel’s spokeswoman Martina Fietz.

PERSONAL DATA and documents on hundreds of German politicians and others have been posted online, and authorities are investigating how the information was obtained.

A spokeswoman for Chancellor Angela Merkel said that the chancellery had been informed of the matter on Thursday evening.

Martina Fietz said politicians at all levels, including the European, German and state parliaments as well as at municipal level, appeared to have been affected.

“The German government takes this incident very seriously,” Ms Fietz said, adding that its cyber-defence centre was looking into the matter.

She told reporters: “As regards the chancellery, it appears at first sight that no sensitive information and data are included in what was published, including regarding the Chancellor.”

Public broadcaster RBB first reported on the issue on Friday morning.

It said there appeared to be no pattern to what was posted on a Twitter account.

Although the data reportedly includes information such as mobile phone numbers, addresses, internal party communications and in some cases personal bills and credit card details – some of the data years old – RBB said there seemed to be no politically sensitive documents.

News agency dpa reported that the information included a fax number and email address belonging to Ms Merkel and several letters to and from the Chancellor.

The Twitter account in question, which was still online early on Friday with about 17,000 followers but had been suspended by around midday, had been active since mid-2017.

The links it posted suggested that information on politicians from all parties in parliament except the far-right Alternative for Germany had been shared in daily batches before Christmas, along with data on YouTubers and other public figures.

But Interior Ministry spokesman Soeren Schmidt said it appeared that all parties in parliament had been affected.

The last post was on December 28.

The head of Germany’s IT security agency, Arne Schoenbohm, said authorities had been aware of individual cases in December but material was posted online on a large scale on Thursday evening.

He said the agency believes data on about 1,000 people were involved, and confirmed that one party in parliament was not affected – though he would not name it.

He said there had been “a high two-digit number of attacks which were very successful” in which accounts were infiltrated and data and documents, such as copies of ID cards, extracted.

“Via this infection, it seems that other data could be tapped, such as first and last names but also cellphone numbers,” he added.

In many cases, he said, the information was limited or already publicly available.

He said the German government’s computer network was not affected and the agency was still working to figure out how the attack started and who was behind it.

Germany has seen cyber attacks on government and parliament computer systems in recent years.

Mr Schoenbohm said that checks on some of the information showed it was genuine, but authorities could not rule out fake data having been mixed in.