Leak with “Antifa list” | AfD confirms hacker attack and remains silent about content

The AfD “strongly appeals to everyone not to use or distribute content that is attributed to data theft.” Photo: IMAGO/Herrmann Agency Photography Berlin. In light of new media reports about emails stolen in a hacker attack on the party, the AfD has confirmed that it does not want to comment on the content. Since the data was copied illegally, the party will not answer questions about "whether alleged leak content is real or fake." We urge everyone not to use or distribute content that is attributed to data theft. Unknown people had previously published data on the Internet that were said to be around 421,000 AfD emails. Traffic dates back to 2014 and ends a few weeks before release. The original data set is 301 gigabytes.

Based on the leaked documents, several media outlets reported on internal communication regarding a party donation from 2017 for the federal election campaign of then AfD top candidate Alice Weidel. Emails with Weidel's sender ID in her constituency in the Lake Constance district suggested that Weidel's account at the time deviated from what she actually knew about the matter.

The AfD did not comment specifically on the reports when asked by the dpa. WDR and NDR quoted Weidel's spokesman as saying that she "has not revised any of her statements in the KV Bodenseekreis donations case." A spokesman had previously explained: "Mrs. Weidel neither expected any specific sums, nor was she sure that individuals would actually donate."

A collection of alleged Antifa members also appears in the leaked emails. It is attached to an email from Jürgen Antoni, spokesman for the AfD in North Rhine-Westphalia. "The list is solely for your information, so that you know where the 'anti-fascists' are in your district association/district and you can 'keep a watchful eye' on these people," explains Antoni.

In his message, Antoni writes about 2,000 names, but the Excel file contains 24,500 entries. In the online searchable AfD leak on the website goebbelmail.com, which was set up by unknown people, the attachment has been removed.

The AfD said it would work closely with state authorities to hold accountable those “who digitally attacked our party and stole data.” The party did not provide any further information about the investigation methods. However, she is said to have now reported a data protection incident to the Berlin data protection authority.

The IT online magazine heise.de advises against downloading the AfD leak via so-called BitTorrent applications and thus distributing it further. These could be data protection violations that could potentially result in criminal prosecution.

With the so-called BitTorrent protocol, users use software to download parts of files and at the same time make them available to others: those who “seed” actively contribute to the distribution. According to the specialist magazine, a tool is already circulating on social networks that is intended to identify and display IP addresses of AfD data seeders. However, this tracking can be circumvented using so-called VPN tunnels. With agencies

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