Germany has accused Russia of carrying out a cyber-attack on its air traffic control authority, and attempting to interfere in the country’s federal elections last year, while proceeding to summon the Russian ambassador in protest over the alleged acts.
A German Foreign Ministry spokesman said Berlin now possessed sufficient evidence linking Moscow to the August 2024 cyber-attack on German Air Safety.
“We can now clearly attribute the cyberattack against German Air Safety in August 2024 to the hacker collective APT28, also known as Fancy Bear” the spokesperson said.
The hacking group is said to be tied to Russia’s military intelligence service, the GRU, which the spokesperson claimed was directly complicit in the attack, as per German intelligence findings.
Fancy Bear has previously been linked by Western intelligence to multiple high-profile operations, including the leak of World Anti-Doping Agency data and the 2016 cyber-attack on the US Democratic National Committee.
He added that Berlin, could also “state definitively that Russia, through the Storm 1516 campaign, sought to influence and destabilize the most recent federal election,”.
The operation allegedly targeted prominent candidates, including the Greens’ Robert Habeck and the CDU’s Friedrich Merz, who later became chancellor.
Security agencies had identified fake videos purporting to show ballot manipulation circulating shortly before polling day, which officials said formed part of a coordinated Russian disinformation effort.
Warning retaliation, he said that Germany would respond would make Moscow “pay a price for its hybrid actions” in close said it would respond in close coordination with its EU partners, he added that Berlin would support “new individual sanctions against hybrid actors at the European level,” without specifying what measures were under consideration.
Russia has not yet responded to the allegations, though it has previously dismissed European claims of any attempted sabotage or hybrid warfare from the Kremlin as unfounded, and a ruse for Brussel’s military expenditures.
