BERLIN (Reuters) – Germany announced on Friday that it had summoned the charge d’affaires of the Russian embassy in Berlin after denouncing a series of cyberattacks dating back to 2022 that it blames on Russian military intelligence services.
“We and our partners will not tolerate these cyberattacks and will use the full range of available measures to prevent, deter and respond to Russia’s aggressive behavior in cyberspace,” a Foreign Ministry spokesperson said. .
The Russian embassy in Berlin rejected these accusations, denouncing “a new unfriendly initiative aimed at arousing anti-Russian sentiment in Germany.”
Cyberattacks carried out in 2022 notably targeted the ruling Social Democratic Party (SPD), as well as companies in the defense, aerospace, logistics and information technology sectors, the Ministry of Defense said. ‘Interior in a press release.
According to the ministry, hacker group APT28, also known as Fancy Bear and linked to Russian military intelligence (GRU), exploited a then-unknown vulnerability in Microsoft Outlook to compromise email accounts.
A German Microsoft spokesperson referred Reuters to a blog post detailing how a Russia-based actor had been using a tool called GooseEgg since April 2019 to steal credentials.
“Russian cyberattacks pose a threat to our democracy, which we resolutely combat,” Interior Minister Nancy Faeser said in a statement, adding that Germany was acting alongside the EU and NATO. .
The Czech Foreign Ministry said on Friday that Czech institutions had also been the target of Russian cyberattacks since last year.
France, via the Quai d’Orsay, provided “full support” to Germany and the Czech Republic and, faced with this “known” threat from Russia, said it was doing “everything possible to strengthen its capacity to adapt to cyber threats and enable the continuity of its activities, in particular in the run-up to the European elections and the Olympic and Paralympic Games in Paris, in conjunction with its partners.”
“It will use all available levers to counter this threat, while respecting international law,” declared the deputy spokesperson for the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs during a press briefing.
(Reporting by Alasdair Pal and Andreas Rinke, writing by Friederike Heine; French version Tangi Salaün, editing by Sophie Louet)
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