German politicians ‘at all levels’ targeted by massive data leak

Berlin says no sensitive material from Merkel’s office was released during the massive breach, which triggered an emergency meeting of Germany's national cyber-defense body.

The data in question includes email addresses, private correspondence, passwords, phone numbers, work emails, and photos, among other information, and those affected reportedly include journalists and celebrities as well as politicians.

According to multiple reports, the data was leaked from the now-suspended Twitter account @_0rbit that began sharing the stolen information in December.

Germany's Federal Office for Information Security released a statement saying there's no evidence yet of a successful cyberattack on government networks.

"After an initial analysis much evidence points towards the data being obtained through the improper use of login details to cloud services, email accounts or social networks," the interior minister, Horst Seehofer, said in a statement, according to The Guardian.
"Currently nothing points towards the system of the parliament or government having been compromised."

Security researchers have noted that the information included in the leak was not only large-scale and detailed, but also extensively spread out across a number of sites and mirror links.

"Way too much effort went into ensuring that this data would be really hard to take down," tweeted one researcher.

The data breach came a couple of months after hackers gained access to thousands of sensitive documents about nuclear power plants, prison facilities and tram networks in a cyber attack on a French company involved in designing nuclear waste sites.

German and French media reported in early November that the cyber attack against Ingerop Engineering Company in the city of Rueil-Malmaison, recently criticized by anti-nuclear activists for its role in construction of nuclear waste dumping site near the French border with Germany.

A number of the documents, the reports noted, were connected with the Fessenheim nuclear plant on the French border with Germany.

The press reports revealed that investigators have found some of the Ingerop data on a rented server in the western German city of Dortmund, without elaborating on potential suspects.