So I'm going to tell this story that popped up today in German national news but relate to this what I've observed about Germans over the past twenty years. ARD (German public TV, Channel One) laid out this story.
Basically, EVERY single political figure in the Bundestag (out of Berlin, the national government) was hacked. Yep, SPD, CDU, FDP, Linke Party, Greens, Merkel, etc. Some commentary suggests that the AfD was not hacked into....I'm not buying that part of the story yet, and question how the individual would have been that 'careful'.
The amount of data? Various sources tell the story in different ways. It does appear that everything that these people had on their email accounts (home address, phone numbers, 'friends', correspondence, and even party chit-chat) was 'gleaned' or copied.
Credit card info too? This is the funny part of the story. So, most Americans I know....got smart a decade ago and started to avoid using credit card numbers in emails. If they bought something, then they used the company server program, typed in their card info, and kept it secure. It appears that these Germans (the political guys) were listing out credit card info on emails. Maybe in their mind, they felt the Bundestag system was 'secure' (I can't imagine that degree of trust).
When did the hack take place? This gets curious. The journalists want to suggest that maybe it's been 'months'. The discovery? Shortly before Christmas. So it only gets into the news spectrum ten days after the discovery is made? Yeah, and that begs questions. Course, Germans have this predictable off-time business.....they will go and let an entire office take the whole Christmas period off, and then pretend that anything occurring in that two-week period....can be handled by one single person.
So what happens now?
I think five things will fall into play:
1. A massive investigation and special committee will be appointed to go and waste six months....confirming that hack did occur, yes it was serious, and they were probably running a marginally protected internal system for the Bundestag. this committee will go and suggest fifty solutions, and less than ten of them will actually get funding/attention. In bureaucratic-speak....a half-ass attempt to intellectually say you weren't running a bad program.
2. A blame-game will start up that only internal AfD folks were part of this. Why avoid hacking them? That would lead me around to think this was intentionally done as a blame-tactic, and the hacker was a player for the Linke Party or Greens.
3. The Russians? Don't worry, they are smart enough to cover their tracks and still keep monitoring each and every Bundestag member. The Russians might have even gone to someone and alerted them that some hacker was messing with their system....just to ensure their monitoring was kept secure.
4. Some private German citizen will wake up....raise his finger, and say....you know, we've been complaining for a decade about hackers doing this to private Germans, and the cops/authorities have done basically NOTHING. So here you are, the Bundestag, and you got all hyped up over this problem which we've openly discussed?
5. Finally, some idiot German law will be discussed and eventually passed (summer of 2020, I predict) that gives a hefty prison sentence to those who hack into a government server. Oddly enough, it won't affect a hack into a private home computer or your little private business computer system. People will go ballistic that the stupid law was created only to protect government sites, and not home computers.
Finally, my own observation of Germans. Technology, social media, and computers have been a major thing in American lives since the late 1990s. I hate to suggest that Germans are a decade behind, but grasping the protection side of data and what hackers can do....I might rate them as still lacking.
At some point around 2005, my son (German, then around 13) had someone who hacked into his World of Warcraft account, and basically stole all of his magic 'coins' (whatever they use for fantasy money), and he got all hyped up for a week or two. The 'term' unfair was spoken on a number of times. I quietly went to his computer and did a virus check (he didn't want the virus software there, claiming it would slow down his system). Yes, there were several different 'problems'. There's not much I can say...other than telling him not to take any disk from his computer and inserting it into the house-computer.
I'd hate to think some Bundestag folks are sitting around the house this morning.....all hyped up that someone stole their magic 'coins' in this little hack episode.
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