AfD confirms 281 GB data breach after hacker publishes internal emails

Germany's Alternative für Deutschland party confirmed a security breach after a hacker published what appear to be hundreds of thousands of its internal emails, with the full archive totalling 281 GB and reportedly including messages dated as recently as 12 September 2024.

The AfD said its hosting provider was hacked in September and that some mailboxes had been copied. The party claimed most affected mailboxes had not been used for years, but the leaked archive contradicts that account.

The leak site Hexane.cc published AI-generated summaries of the messages, categorised under headings including racism and antisemitism and graded from Low to Critical. The full corpus, available via torrent, claims to contain 421,179 stolen internal party emails and more than 100,000 files. The hacker said the leak was intended to expose the party's "degeneracy and hypocrisy."

Party sources told media that while the leaked emails appeared authentic, the AI-generated summaries contained several inaccuracies.

The hacker also claimed that someone using a Proton Mail address offered 100,000 euros to take down the leak site.

Access to the breach reportedly came through an unpatched website, though this has not been independently verified. The incident follows a separate September 3 episode in which a press spokesman for the AfD's group in the Thuringia state parliament warned that his work email account had been used to send phishing emails.