German and foreign security services have reissued a warning for phishing attacks targeting lawmakers and senior government officials via the Signal messaging application, in what is believed to be the work of a “state-controlled cyber actor”.<\/p>\n
The German government believes Russia is behind the phishing attacks.<\/p>\n
“The federal government is assuming that the phishing campaign targeting the Signal messaging service was presumably run from Russia,” a government source told press agency AFP.<\/p>\n
Victims are reportedly sent messages from Signal support, which asks them to enter a PIN, open a link or scan a QR code. If the scam is successful, the hackers can gain access to messages, chat groups and photos and files shared by the user.<\/p>\n
The attackers can also impersonate the person whose account has been compromised.<\/p>\n
While the government has not elaborated on how many lawmakers were affected by the phishing campaign, local media estimate at least 300 accounts belonging to political figures were compromised.<\/p>\n
Many users had made the move from WhatsApp to Signal following privacy concerns after WhatsApp said it would share metadata with parent company Meta, which owns Facebook and Instagram.<\/p>\n
“The number of unreported cases will continue to rise in the coming days,” Konstantin von Notz, an MP who is deputy chief of the intelligence oversight committee told AFP.<\/p>\n
“At present, no one can say with any certainty whether the integrity of MPs’ communications is still guaranteed,” he added.<\/p>\n
In addition to high-profile politicians, civil servants, diplomats, military personnel and journalists were also targeted.<\/p>\n
The Bundestag is now debating how to deal with the incidents. Vice-President of the German Bundestag Andrea Lindholz (CSU) rejects a ban on using Signal, and said she believes MPs are free to make their own decisions.<\/p>\n
However, the question was raised whether the desktop version of the Signal app should be restricted on Bundestag computers.<\/p>\n
Germany is Ukraine’s biggest provider of military aid and has frequently been the target of cyberattacks, as well as espionage and sabotage plots since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.<\/p>\n
Moscow has repeatedly denied involvement in any such actions.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"German and foreign security services have reissued a warning for phishing attacks targeting lawmakers and senior government officials…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":7633,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[464,5,7251,7261,7415,1831,7564,7565],"class_list":{"0":"post-7632","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-germany","8":"tag-german-government","9":"tag-germany","10":"tag-government-officials","11":"tag-messaging-service","12":"tag-phishing-attacks","13":"tag-russia","14":"tag-signal-app","15":"tag-the-bundestag"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7632","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=7632"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7632\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/7633"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=7632"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=7632"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/germany\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=7632"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}