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| © Fabrizio Bensch/Reuters Personal information about hundreds of German lawmakers was leaked by an anonymous Twitter account. None of those lawmakers were from the far-right party Alternative for Germany, or AfD. |
By MELISSA EDDY, The New York Times
Twitter shut down an account on Friday that an unidentified hacker
had been using for weeks to expose the personal details of dozens of
German lawmakers across the political spectrum.
It was not
immediately clear who was behind the leaks, which included personal
emails, chats and contact details, and which were posted on Twitter by
an account named GOd. But the breach targeted lawmakers from every major
political party but one — the far-right Alternative for Germany, or AfD
— as well as artists with leftist political leanings.
The leaked data was released through links published on Twitter in
the form of an advent calendar, beginning with information about the
German television comedian Jan Böhmermann
on Dec. 1 and ending with members of Chancellor Angela Merkel’s
center-right party and its Bavarian counterpart. German news outlets
reported the leaked information late Thursday, and it was not
immediately clear why it took more than a month for it to be found.
The
Federal Office for Information Security called a crisis meeting on
Friday to coordinate with the country’s domestic and foreign
intelligence agencies in investigating the leaks. Based on an initial
assessment, the office said, it did not appear that the main government
network had been affected.
Martina Fietz, a spokeswoman for Ms.
Merkel, said that it did not appear that sensitive information from the
chancellery, or any of the chancellor’s personal data, had been leaked.
German news outlets reported that Ms. Merkel and President Frank-Walter
Steinmeier had been among those targeted.
Hours after news of the
hacking broke, Twitter deleted the account that had been used to publish
links to the information, which appeared on several different servers.
Users could gain access to the data through simple passwords published
on the information pages.
A spokesman for the Left Party confirmed
that the information of some of its members had been exposed, including
Dietmar Bartsch, leader of its group in the lower house of Parliament.
The
first person whose information was leaked was Mr. Böhmermann, who
sought several months ago to organize opposition to a group of far-right
trolls known as Reconquista Germanica. The leak, which included Mr.
Böhmermann’s phone numbers, personal chats and photographs of his two
young sons, was advertised as, “Nice things that you can have fun with.”
Germany’s
main government network was breached by hackers in 2015, and the
authorities worried that information obtained then would be used against
politicians leading up to the 2017 election. Those fears were largely
unfounded.
Hackers appeared to have again penetrated the German government’s main data network in March,
however, a system that was supposed to be particularly secure and is
used by the chancellor’s office, ministries and Parliament.
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