"Major Incident": Hacker Attack on Election Authority Just a Few Days Before German Parliament Elections

Only three weeks ago, unknown persons had paralyzed the website of the Federal Election Commissioner. It had collapsed under the data load after a large number of calls from the Internet and was temporarily no longer accessible. Last week, a spokesperson assured that servers important for the federal election had not been affected, however.

According to information from "Business Insider", another hacker attack apparently occurred this Wednesday. According to the report, the Federal Information Technology Center (ITZBund), the central IT service provider of the federal administration, classifies the event as a "major incident", i.e. a serious security event.

According to Business Insider, software (web shell) was apparently installed on a so-called Confluence program of the Federal Statistical Office, whose head is also the Federal Election Commissioner. This enables external access to servers and file systems. How exactly this happened and whether data was leaked is currently still being investigated. The German Federal Office for Information Security classified the event as a cyber attack in connection with the Bundestag elections.

For weeks and months, experts have been warning of possible hacker attacks and fake news campaigns in connection with the upcoming federal election. Only recently, Federal Election Commissioner Georg Thiel told "Tagesschau" that he was even bracing himself for the possibility of a cyber attack happening on election day itself, precisely on the "bundeswahlleiter.de" website, for example. This could then be used to question the legitimacy of the entire election with the help of a fake news campaign via social media. Experts attribute such possible attempts primarily to Russia. However, Thiel gives the all-clear: "For such cases, we have taken precise precautions with important social media and the public broadcasters and can react quickly to correct such reports."