AfD confirms hacker attack on email accounts

Unknown people carried out a hacker attack on AfD email accounts and, according to their own statements, published data from them. The AfD confirmed an attack on mailboxes, but most of them were not me

Unknown people publish data AfD confirms hacker attack on email accounts As of: October 20, 2026 • 6:38 p.m

According to the AfD, data from the party's email accounts was allegedly stolen in a hacker attack.

"In September 2026 there was a hacker attack on one of our party's hosting service providers, in which parts of a few mailboxes - most of which had not been used for years - were apparently illegally copied," said the AfD upon request. The Bild newspaper had previously reported. Current email inboxes of the AfD federal association were not affected.

Unknown people published data on the Internet, which they said was around 421,000 AfD emails. Whether these are authentic or not is unclear. The Federal Office for Information Security announced that it was in contact with the AfD.

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A link to a website is circulating on the Internet that is said to contain an overview of the alleged AfD emails. The anonymous site was only registered in mid-October and lists its headquarters as Wyoming in the USA. It does not provide any information about the origin of the data and does not publish any email content. These are supposedly on another download server.

The unknown persons claim that it concerns data from ten mailboxes, including an account in the name of the former AfD party leader Alexander Gauland and an account that was previously named by the AfD as a contact for the federal office. According to Bild, the senders of the emails include the AfD politicians Alice Weidel and Leif-Erik Holm.

According to the Bild newspaper, the emails contain, among other things, a photo of the ID card of the AfD deputy parliamentary group leader in the Bundestag, Markus Frohnmaier. In addition, photos of other ID cards, invoices, bank statements, certificates as well as membership applications and membership lists from AfD district associations in North Rhine-Westphalia.

The AfD said the attack was quickly recognized and stopped. All users were informed accordingly. “The online publication of probably part of this data is being examined,” it said. An initial assessment can only be made after this test has been completed.

Late in the afternoon, the party announced that such a digital attack was illegal and criminally relevant. "We are very concerned that it appears that very rudimentary AI was used to analyze the contents of the stolen documents. It was about keywords, not the context." The alleged scandals published so far have not stood up to scrutiny.

Party circles had previously said that the content published on the Internet appeared to be authentic, although some things had been mixed up in the summaries, which were apparently created using AI.

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According to the AfD, the company Alternita, which belongs to the AfD, was apparently affected by the hacker attack. Among other things, the hackers had access to emails from the regional associations of North Rhine-Westphalia and Mecklenburg-Western Pomerania. Apparently it's about mailboxes that are older, even if the emails themselves are sometimes relatively current.

According to the information, certain AfD mailboxes did not work a few weeks ago. The federal office declared at the time that there was an attack and the mailboxes were therefore switched off.

Cyber attacks on political parties and government agencies are nothing new. Just a few days ago, hackers broke into the Heilbronn CDU's email account and sent thousands of phishing messages from there. The federal CDU was the target of a major cyber attack in May 2024. As a precaution, some of the IT infrastructure was taken offline at the time. The Federal Prosecutor General later took over the investigation because espionage was suspected.

Email accounts at the SPD party headquarters had already been the target of an attack at the end of 2022/beginning of 2023. The security authorities later assigned this to a group controlled by the Russian military intelligence service GRU.