BERLIN, October 20. /TASS/. The Alternative for Germany (AfD) party has been hit by a major cyberattack that may have exposed hundreds of thousands of emails, the Bild newspaper reported.
AfD representatives confirmed the cyberattack to the newspaper but provided no details on the extent of the leak. According to Bild, unidentified hackers breached the party’s email accounts and published materials online. The leaked dataset reportedly contains 421,179 emails totaling 281 gigabytes. AI-generated summaries of the emails’ contents have already been posted on a specialized website. The senders reportedly include leading AfD politicians, including party co-chair Alice Weidel, honorary chairman Alexander Gauland, and Bundestag member Leif-Erik Holm.
Bild experts who obtained limited access to the published materials found personal documents belonging to party members in the dataset. In particular, photographs of the identity card of Markus Frohnmaier, deputy leader of the AfD parliamentary group in the Bundestag, as well as those of other party representatives, were leaked online. The published materials include invoices, bank statements, diplomas, party membership applications, and membership lists of AfD district branches in the federal state of North Rhine-Westphalia.