Germany blames Russia for last year’s hacker attack

Russia will face the consequences of a cyber attack carried out by a group linked to Russian military intelligence. Such a statement did on Friday by German Foreign Minister Annalena Bärbock.

“Today we can unequivocally attribute this attack last year to the APT28 group, which is controlled by the Russian military intelligence GRU. In other words, Russian state hackers attacked Germany in cyberspace. This is completely unacceptable and will not go without consequences,” Baerbock said.

The hacker group APT28 is also known as Fancy Bear. She is credited with a number of hacker attacks around the world.

In January 2023, several German government websites were hacked. Berlin then said that Russian hackers did this in response to the country’s decision to supply tanks to Ukraine.

In this case, responsibility for the attack is then took Russian hacker group Killnet has taken over. On January 25, 2023, a message appeared in the group’s Telegram channel about the start of an attack on the websites of government agencies, banks and airports in Germany. The targets of the cyberattack among government agencies were the websites of the Federal Government, the Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Finance, and the German police.

In addition, in 2023, the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD) was subject to a hacker attack. The targets of the attack were several email accounts of party leaders. This became possible due to a vulnerability in Microsoft software, which was not yet known at the time the attack began.