Hackers steal 421 000 emails from Germany's AfD

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Germany's far-right AfD party hit by mass email theft euronews.com

Hackers stole 421,000 emails from members and officials of Germany's AfD party in an attack on an email service provider used by the party, the AfD has confirmed to AFP. The haul includes correspondence of co-leader Alice Weidel and co-founder Alexander Gauland, according to Bild.

A website has since published what it says are summaries of some of the stolen messages — not the originals — together with photos of party members' ID cards, bank statements, membership applications and membership lists from local branches. The AfD says "a small number of email accounts, most of which had not been used for years, were apparently copied unlawfully", that the attack was "quickly detected and stopped" and that all users were subsequently informed. Who carried it out, and whether additional data was compromised, remains unclear.

The attack came in September, the same month the AfD came first in two state elections ahead of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU. Its biggest win was in Saxony-Anhalt, where the party now hopes to form Germany's first far-right state government since the second world war. The party tops national opinion polls and is already under observation by Germany's domestic intelligence service.

Whoever holds the rest — hundreds of thousands of messages, membership rolls, financial records — has so far published only summaries. The AfD says it is reviewing what has appeared online; the material already out, from ID cards to the correspondence of its co-leader and co-founder, came from what the party calls a small number of accounts, most of them unused for years.