More than 345,000 unique email addresses, alongside hundreds of thousands of confidential messages and attachments, were exposed in the September compromise of Alternative for Germany’s mail infrastructure. Have I Been Pwned confirmed the figures this week, after the party formally disclosed the incident.
AfD had told the public that “only a few email accounts were illegally copied,” while conceding that a large volume of data left those accounts. The gap between the two statements is now measured in six figures.
How it reportedly started
Investigative journalist Lilith Wittmann, citing conversations with the criminals and party sources, reported that the intrusion was first noticed on September 9. It began, she wrote, at a weakly protected WordPress site.
From there the attackers are said to have held persistent access to servers run by Alternita Dienstleistungs GmbH, an AfD-owned hosting company, and to have pulled more than a terabyte of material. None of those mechanics have been independently verified.
Summarised, then published
The stolen mail was fed into what the party calls an activist website, which turned email chains into searchable topics. AfD argues the analysis was crude keyword matching rather than real reading, and that the resulting stories do not hold up.
Der Spiegel, working from the raw files rather than summaries, reported that party leader Alice Weidel knew about illegal donations tied to the 2017 federal election weeks earlier than she had previously said.
Account holders have been notified and the party says it reported the intrusion to authorities.
