08 Jan 2019; DW: A 20-year-old has been arrested in Germany after a massive political data leak revealed personal information about leading politicians. The BKA police are to present further information.
The man was arrested in Hesse on Tuesday in preliminary proceedings on suspicion of spying and the unauthorized disclosure of personal data.
Hackers had published personal data from Chancellor Angela Merkel and other leading politicians, celebrities and journalists. Politicians from all political parties except the right-wing Alternative for Germany (AfD) were affected.
Germany's investigative police force (BKA) said the suspect's apartment had been searched on Sunday, after which the arrest was made. The home of a 19-year-old man in Heilbronn, a town north of Stuttgart, who had contact with the suspected hacker was also searched. He is cooperating with police.
A press conference is to be held later on Tuesday. Unconfirmed media reports said that the suspect had confessed.
Germany's biggest data leak?
The data included personal phone numbers and addresses, internal party documents and credit card details; it was published online via a Twitter account. It is thought to have been one of the largest data leaks in Germany's history.
Interior Minister Horst Seehofer has pledged to provide clarity and find out from the heads of the country's criminal police office (BKA) and cyber defense agency (BSI)what they knew about the cyberattack and how they dealt with it.
Stephan Mayer, state secretary in the interior ministry said government networks had not been breached in the attack. "One bit of positive news is that government networks are apparently not affected by this or these hacker attacks," Mayer said. "But it's clear that we as the federal government ... must do more to improve cyber security."
An advent calendar of data leaks
The documents were published online in December in the form of an advent calendar with one post per day from the #-Orbit account, but appears to have gone unnoticed until the first week of January when it was closed down. The account had gathered 18,000 followers.
Newspaper Bild said the leaks contained data belonging to 405 politicians from Merkel's CDU-CSU alliance, 294 from the SPD social democrats, 105 from the Greens, 82 Left party members and 28 FDP MPs.
