Cyberattack on Left Party faction: thousands of spam emails paralyse mailboxes
Left Party MPs in the Bundestag fell victim to a massive spam-bombing attack. Email mailboxes were flooded with tens of thousands of messages and are partly unusable.
Massive cyberattack on Left Party mailboxes
According to Tagesschau, the email mailboxes of Left Party MPs in the Bundestag have been paralysed by a massive cyberattack. Thousands of messages reached the email accounts within a very short time and made them partly unusable.
The attack is classified as "spam-bombing". According to parliamentary business manager Ina Latendorf, every faction member already received over 20,000 emails — continuously, new messages arriving by the second. The messages came from different senders, had different subject lines and were written in several languages. "This severely restricts the working capacity of the offices of our faction members," Latendorf told the ARD capital studio.
Other Bundestag factions reported no impact after enquiries. Latendorf confirmed that she contacted the factions on Saturday and Sunday — no other MPs were affected. The perpetrators of the attack have not yet been identified.
The Bundestag's IT infrastructure itself remained functional. The affected MPs received filter instructions for managing the flood. The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) was brought in. According to Tagesschau, the attack is unrelated to warnings about possible spyware on iPhones of government members.
Source: Tagesschau