It concerns German politicians, journalists and personalities. Though the suspicions were falling on the far-right german party, as well as on the Russian government, German authorities were surprised to discover the person behind this attack.
This 4th of January 2019, personal documents and addresses were published on Twitter concerning German public personalities. The twitter user is anonymous and presented himself as a cybersecurity researcher. According to the government spokesperson, none of these documents revealed anything sensitive and political but those documents could be used in order to prepare another cyberattack.
Although many politic personalities express themselves on this attack with suspicions falling on a specific far-right German party or the Russian government, the national cybersecurity centre opened an investigation and discovered who was behind the attack.
An « Angry » young hacker
The German police arrested a young man of 20 years old living in his parents’ house in the state of Hesse. The young student declared to be « angry » towards several opinions expressed by public personalities of his country. According to the authorities, his skills in computing are to be told in relative terms: as an autodidact he proceeded to a careful social engineering via social medias and mails over the year 2018. In particular, he used a form of cyber harassment called « doxxing » which consists on gathering progressively information without any specific skill required in computing.
This case is edifying about the trivialisation of cybercrime, which is accessible to most people.
