The foreign minister Annalena Baerbock and the economy minister Robert Habeck's email accounts were both compromised last month, according to the German Green party, which is a member of the coalition government of the nation.
The party acknowledged a revelation published on Saturday by the German magazine Der Spiegel, but claimed that the two had stopped using official party accounts since January.
According to a report on a German magazine Der Spiegel on Thursday, the Green Party said that a total of 14 accounts, including the party's co-leaders' Omid Nouripour and Ricarda Lang, were also hacked and that certain messages were sent to other servers. The article further read that the attack also had an impact on the party's "Grüne Netz" intranet IT system, where private information is exchanged.
The party declined to acknowledge Der Spiegel's claim that an electronic trace suggested the cyberattack may have originated in Russia because of the current investigation by German authorities.
"More than these email accounts are affected," the party official claimed. The topic concerns emails using the domain "@gruene.de." The representative stated that it was yet unknown who had hacked in. The first indication of the attack came on May 30 and since June 13, when specialists determined that there had been a breach, access to the system has been restricted.
Authorities blamed the unauthorized access on Russian state-sponsored hackers. Baerbock has consistently taken a harsh approach in response to Russia's abuse of human rights and aggression against Ukraine. Since taking office in December, Habeck has been in charge of Germany's initiatives to wean itself off of Russian energy sources.
Network logs, according to the Greens, did not reflect any signs of the increased traffic levels that would indicate the theft of a significant amount of data.
