Pierluigi Paganini June 02, 2015

The German Government confirmed that hackers that attacked the Bundestag two weeks ago have had access to data of the German Parliament.

The German Government has confirmed that hackers who breached the Bundestag systems a couple of weeks ago have also stolen data from targeted network. A spokeswoman for the Bundestag, Germany’s parliament, confirmed that unknown hackers have stolen data during the cyber attack, the investigators have uncovered several data leaks.

“A spokeswoman for Germany’s lower house of parliament, the Bundestag, confirmed that hackers had managed to steal data during the cyber attack two weeks ago. She described the detection of several data leaks.” reported Germany’s international broadcaster Deutsche Welle.

Steffi Lemke, a representative of the Greens party, explained that the discovery of data leaks confirms that “the impact of the cyber attack on the Bundestag is worse than previously thought.”

“This attack reveals the Interior Ministry has completely missed out on establishing a functioning cyber defense,” Lemke said.

The authorities have provided further details on the alleged origin of the attack neither on the amount of data stolen by the attackers, which seems to have targeted so-called “scattered data outflows” originated from several Government offices. The hackers used a malware to gain access the internal servers of the Bundestag.

In time I’m writing there is no news regarding the type of information the attacker searched for, as explained by the spokeswoman.

“The concerned agencies have been informed and countermeasures have been taken,” the spokeswoman said.

German news agency Der Spiegel reported that Government IT staff IT had noticed suspicious activities that could be linked to the attack. The experts at the Bundestag detected two infected servers within the internal network that were trying to contact C&C servers located in Eastern Europe.

The journalists at the Der Spiegel also speculate a possible involvement of a foreign government.

They said the espionage attempts were first discovered in May when two computers infected with malicious software tried to connect to a server in Eastern Europe.

According to the Deutsche Welle, many other machines have also been infected.

Pierluigi Paganini

(Security Affairs – Bundestag, data breach)

[adrotate banner=”5″]

[adrotate banner=”13″]