German spy chief says Russian hackers could disrupt elections

Cyber-attacks aim to delegitimise democratic process and elicit political uncertainty, says Bruno Kahl

Bruno Kahl and Chancellor Angela Merkel have warned about the impact of cyber-attacks in the run-up to next year’s elections in Germany. Photograph: Reuters

Kate Connolly in Berlin-Tuesday 29 November 2016 

The head of Germany’s foreign intelligence service has warned that next year’s general election could be targeted by Russian hackers intent on spreading misinformation and undermining the democratic process.

Bruno Kahl, president of the Bundesnachrichtendienst, said Russia may have been behind attempts during the US presidential campaign to interfere with the vote.

“We have evidence that cyber-attacks are taking place that have no purpose other than to elicit political uncertainty,” he told the Süddeutsche Zeitung in his first interview since he was appointed five months ago.

“The perpetrators are interested in delegitimising the democratic process as such, regardless of who that ends up helping. We have indications that [the attacks] come from the Russian region.

“Being able to attribute it to a state agent is technically difficult but there is some evidence that this is at least tolerated or desired by the state.”

Kahl said the suspicion was that a large proportion of attacks were being carried out simply to demonstrate technical prowess. “The traces that are left behind in the internet create an impression of someone wanting to demonstrate what they are capable of,” he said.

Kahl joins a range of leading voices in Germany who have recently expressed their concerns over Russian interference, particularly through the spread of fake news stories.

Hans-Georg Maaßen, president of the domestic BfV intelligence agency, said in an interview that cyberspace had become “a place of hybrid warfare” in which Russia was a key player. “More recently, we see the willingness of Russian intelligence to carry out sabotage,” he said.

Maaßen said Russian secret services had been carrying out attacks on computer systems in Germany which, as far as his agency had been able to ascertain, were “aimed at comprehensive strategic data gathering”.

Only when people were confronted with the fact the information they were receiving was untrue would “the toxic lies lose their effectiveness”, he said.

Recent Deutsche Telekom outages are believed to be part of a worldwide attempt to hijack routing devices. Photograph: Reuters

Hackers were said to have been behind attacks on Deutsche Telekom on Sunday and Monday that disabled internet and phone access for almost a million customers in Germany. The company said the security breach was part of a worldwide attack on routers. Security experts said the hackers may have been Russian but they had no proof.

The German chancellor, Angela Merkel, said on Tuesday she did not know who was responsible for the strike but “such cyber-attacks, or hybrid conflicts as they are known in Russian doctrine, are now part of daily life and we must learn to cope with them.

“We have to inform people, and express our political convictions clearly,” she said, calling on the population to not allow themselves to be irritated by such rogue operations. “You just have to know that there’s such a thing and learn to live with it,” she said.

Arne Schönbohm, president of the Federal Office for Information Security and known as Germany’s ‘“cyber sheriff”, called the Deutsche Telekom attacks worrying: “It shows to what extent cyber-attacks can affect every citizen. We need to get used to the idea that in future computer attacks, both comparable and far worse, will increasingly take place.”

In 2015, an attack on internet in the German parliament was blamed on Russian hackers by German intelligence. Russian officials have strenuously denied the accusations.

Germany faces a heated election campaign next year, largely due to the pressure Merkel is under over her liberal refugee policy, along with the rise of rightwing populists Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), which is on track to enter the Bundestag for the first time.

Public disenchantment towards Merkel – under fire also for her critical stance towards Russia over its annexation of the Crimea – is ripe for exploitation by her political opponents, several of whom, including the AfD, have reached out to the Kremlin and vice versa.

Merkel has also warned that populists and social media platforms spreading propaganda were in danger of causing unprecedented damage to democracy.

Speaking to the Bundestag last week, she said: “Today we have fake sites, bots, trolls – things that regenerate themselves, reinforcing opinions with certain algorithms, and we must learn how to deal with them.”

A report published this month by the Atlantic Council on Russian Influence on France, Germany and the UK, pointed to an extensive Russian “disinformation campaign” being carried out in Germany, which it said had “opened opportunities for the Kremlin to influence German politics and the public debate”.

The Pegida anti-Islam movement has repeatedly hammered home the message at its rallies that the influence of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia in Germany is a welcome alternative to the imperial designs of the US and Brussels.