Germany blames Russia for cyberattack on air safety, election interference

BERLIN: Germany on Friday accused Russia of cyberattacks targeting its air traffic control and February’s general election, and said it had summoned the Russian ambassador to protest.

A foreign ministry spokesman said German security services had proof that hacker groups run by Russia’s military intelligence service GRU were responsible for the attacks and influence operations.

“Based on comprehensive analysis by the German intelligence services, we have been able to clearly identify the handwriting behind it and prove Moscow’s responsibility,” said the spokesman.

“We can now clearly attribute the cyberattack against German Air Safety in August 2024 to the hacker collective APT28, also known as Fancy Bear,” he told a regular press briefing.

“Our intelligence findings prove that the Russian military intelligence service GRU bears responsibility for this attack,” added the spokesman.

He also said Russia had sought to influence February’s parliamentary election, which was won by the conservatives of Chancellor Friedrich Merz, with the far-right AfD scoring its best-ever result in second place.

“Second, we can now state definitively that Russia, through the Storm 1516 campaign, sought to influence and destabilise the most recent federal election,” he added at a press conference.

The spokesman said a GRU-supported Moscow think tank and other groups had spread artificially generated or deepfake images and other content, and that the goal was to divide society and “undermine trust in democratic institutions”.

Erdogan suggests to Putin limited Ukraine-Russia ceasefire

‘Pay a price’

The spokesman said Germany had “absolutely solid proof” that Russia was behind the operations but added that he could not go into detail because this would involve discussing the work of German intelligence services.

Contacted by AFP, the Russian embassy in Berlin declined to immediately comment on the allegations.

The German ministry spokesman also warned that Berlin would take “a series of countermeasures to make Russia pay a price for its hybrid actions, in close coordination with our European partners”.

Germany would support “new individual sanctions against hybrid actors on a European level”, he said, without saying who they were.

He added that from January, EU countries would “monitor cross-border travel by Russian diplomats within the Schengen Area. The aim is to facilitate better information exchange and minimise intelligence risks.”

Governments across Europe are on high alert over alleged Russian espionage, drone surveillance and sabotage activities, as well as cyberattacks and disinformation campaigns.

Germany has been Ukraine’s second-biggest supplier of aid since Russia launched its 2022 full-scale invasion and has accused Moscow of being behind drone flights near several European airports in recent months.

German Merz has argued that the drone flights were evidence that Russian President Vladimir Putin was trying to unsettle the continent with “hybrid attacks”.

“It is Russia that is trying to destabilise us in Germany and in Europe ever more ruthlessly with hybrid methods of war,” Merz said in October. “We will defend ourselves against them now and in the future.”