Russian hackers hit parliament data
Russian hackers were accused on Thursday of being behind a damaging cyberattack on the German parliament that could require a complete overhaul of computer equipment, costing millions of euros.
The invasion of the main Bundestag system was spotted a month ago but investigators have now admitted that the trojan program has not been closed down properly and may still be stealing private data.
A trail appears to lead to an ‘‘eastern intelligence community’’, Der Spiegel magazine reported on Thursday, leading experts to suggest that the SVR, the Russian foreign intelligence service, was behind the attack.
French investigators also said that Russian hackers were now suspected of staging a spectacular cyberattack that was initially blamed on Islamists and which paralysed France’s TV5Monde, an international television network, in April.
The German security breach came at a delicate time for relations with Russia, as Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, has become increasingly frustrated in her attempts to negotiate with President Vladimir Putin to end the fighting in Ukraine.
There is also a sensitive inquiry under way by a parliamentary committee – which uses the systems being attacked – into spying on German communications by the United States National Security Agency.
‘‘The trojans are still active,’’ a source at the Bundestag said, meaning that data from the internal computer system known as parlakom was continuing to flow out of the building to an unknown destination.
Security experts talked of a ‘‘total loss’’ of the software program and there were suggestions that the hardware was also irreparably contaminated and may have to be replaced.
Not only would this cost millions of euros and cause massive disruption but it would be another national embarrassment following the revelations by Edward Snowden, the former US spy agency contractor, that the Americans eavesdropped on Merkel’s phone.
The atmosphere of paranoia surrounding spying in Berlin has led to a row behind the scenes about allowing the domestic intelligence service, the BfV, full access to the Bundestag system to investigate. German intelligence has been accused of helping the US to gather information.
At the time of the French incident in April, the attackers claimed on TV5’s website to be representing Islamic State. However, the French national agency for information system security has traced the assault on the network’s system to a group of Russia-based hackers known as APT28, who are believed to be controlled by the Kremlin, state investigators said.
Along with the rest of Europe, France has fallen out with Russia over its conduct in the Ukraine crisis, but President Hollande has incurred special wrath with his refusal to hand over to Russia two Mistral class warships that have been built in a French shipyard.
The APT28 group is blamed for cyberattacks on White House and Nato computers, and on critics of Russia at home and abroad.
A computer security company told L’Express news magazine that the codes used to break into the TV5 computers had been typed on Cyrillic alphabet keyboards at times that matched working hours in Russia.