Hackers dump data on Chancellor Angela Merkel, hundreds of German politicians

Hackers tried to infiltrate computers of think tanks associated with the governing CDU and SPD parties in 2017. A year earlier, scammers set up a fake server in Latvia to flood German lawmakers with phishing emails.

Hackers have released personal data linked to Chancellor Angela Merkel and hundreds of other politicians in Germany in the biggest data dump of its kind in the country.

The information includes email addresses, mobile phone numbers, photos of IDs and personal chat transcripts, according to an initial review on Friday. It was leaked over the past weeks via a Twitter account called “G0d” that identifies itself as based in Hamburg and describes itself using the words “security researching,” “artist” and “satire & irony.”

It looks like the hackers got the passwords to Facebook accounts and Twitter profiles and worked their way up from there, collecting additional data in the process, said Simon Hegelich, a political scientist at Munich’s Technical University who has studied the manipulation of social networks.

“It’s a very elaborately done social engineering attack,” he said Friday by phone. “It’s a lot of data that’s been dumped.” Bundestag Hack Germany has seen a range of intrusions in recent years.