Authorities prepare – these cyber risks threaten the choice in Berlin

According to information from security circles, however, there are no findings that indicate a specific risk for the early federal elections on 23 February. Nevertheless, you want to secure yourself and do not want to offer foreign actors a target area.

Election process itself not threatened
According to the responsible persons, the election process itself is not at risk – thanks to the slow digitization of the German government. Because the decisive steps are still being performed analogously here. The federal office, Ruth Brand, is supported by the Federal Office of Safety in Information Technology (BSI) in securing the digital transfer of the state results and determining the provisional election result. However, the final election result is nevertheless based on the writings of the election boards.

Memories of the “Doppelganger” campaign
A particularly striking example of political disinformation is the “Doppelger” campaign that was collected in 2022. Attempts were made here to spread Russian stories for the Ukraine war through deceptively real online portals or web performances. It was clearly also about questioning democratic values ​​through conscious false information on the internet and on social media.

After the campaign had started, fake websites were noticed in various EU countries that imitated the internet pages of well-known media or institutions. At the end of July 2023, the EU placed five organizations associated with the Russian state and seven people as those responsible for a sanction list. Part of the campaign were fakecitates that were placed in the mouth of the entertainment industry and spread over social networks.

According to security circles, the focus of the greens, the SPD and the CDU/CSU, especially in the focus of security circles.

Deepfakes: When photos and videos are
Through new developments in the field of artificial intelligence, people and intelligence services that deal with manipulating public opinion. At the beginning of December, for example, the top candidate of De Groenen, Minister of Economy Robert Habeck, was the goal of a disinformation campaign using AI. A report on alleged accusations of abuse appeared on a website that was no longer available shortly thereafter. This also included a video manipulated with AI. The federal office for the protection of the Constitution evaluates the report with the false claims as an intended attempt to discredit the politician.

It is often very difficult for laymen to recognize such counterfeits. With deepfake tools you can make artificial speech recordings that can hardly be distinguished from the real voice. In the case of the inventions against Habeck, the traces, such as in such cases, interpret in the direction of Moscow. Against the background of the Russian war war against Ukraine, Russia had the greatest and most obvious interest in influencing the elections in their own sense, the protection of the Constitution said in November.

Fear of hacker attacks and data leaks
Here the security authorities prepare for “Hack and Lek” activities. These are cyber attacks in which you get access to internal communication to publish them later, often with the aim of replacing the affected or feeding political debates on certain subjects.

For example, last year a Russian intelligence service had listened to a webex switch from four high officers of the Air Force. The recording was made public. The officers had discussed operational scenarios for the German cruise emissions.

There was an example of “hack and leak” for the purpose of the election influence in the United States in 2016. A Russian Hacker group had recorded e -mails of the Democratic Party at the time. The e -mails were then published shortly before the elections and had damaged Hillary Clinton, then the opposite candidate of the current President Donald Trump.

Cyber ​​attacks on parties not unusual
A cyber attack on the CDU was known in June. The protection of the Constitution and the Federal Office for Information Technology then started investigations. The central membership file was influenced, among other things. Here it is believed that Chinese hackers can stand behind the attack. According to German experts, China has so far been interested in classical espionage to obtain information, not in the publication of recorded data.

The SPD was the victim of a cyber attack in 2023. At that time, e -mail accounts from the party head office were hacked. The German government blamed a unity of the Russian military secret service for this attack. The Federal Ministry of Foreign Affairs ordered a high Russian diplomat in May and called the German ambassador in Moscow, Alexander Grabsdorff, a week back to Berlin.

Algorithms deliver propaganda in a targeted way
By focusing content on the basis of user profiles – so – related microtargeting – election advertisements or disinformation can be aimed at specific target groups. Moreover, public opinion can be influenced, because algorithms often prefer polarizing, emotional content. So -called social bots, reinforce this effect. Social bots are automated programs that work on social networks, post comments and simulate human behavior. They also create and distribute their own content.

About a month before the elections, the Minister of the Interior Nancy Faeser (SPD) invited the operators of various platforms. Among other things, it was about the issue of algorithms. Faeser’s message: “The large internet platforms are responsible for what happens on their platforms.”