After massive cyber attack, Germany’s security apparatus struggles to answer questions

Nicholas Waller JANUARY 9, 2019

Investigators traced the man through digital tracks he left on the internet, as well as by speaking to witnesses, including another unnamed 19-year-old man that the hacker had communicated with via an encrypted messaging service. The hacker, who used the pseudonyms “G0t” and “Orbit”, was arrested on January 6 after investigators searched his home.

“Bad passwords were one of the reasons he had it so easy,” Seehofer said. “I was shocked at how simple most passwords were: ‘ILoveYou’, ‘1,2,3’. A whole array of really simple things.”

The latest incident comes just over a month after German security officials detected a major cyber attack against the email accounts of German lawmakers, as well as the military, and several German embassies by a Russian hacker group with ties to Moscow’s military intelligence wing, the GRU.

That attack occurred less than a year after the BfV, Germany’s intelligence service, said the Russian government was behind a cyberattack on German computer networks that was discovered in December 2017 and was also linked to the same hacker group that carried out the November 2018 breach.

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