Industry NewsData Breach
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Hacker leaks 281 GB of data from Germany’s far-right AfD party
Germany’s far-right AfD (Alternative für Deutschland) party has confirmed that it has suffered a security breach, after a hacker published what appear to be hundreds of thousands of the controversial political party’s internal emails.
Earlier this week, the AfD admitted that its hosting provider had been hacked in September, and that some of its mailboxes had been copied. The party claims that most of the affected mailboxes had not been used for years, but the leaked archive reportedly includes messages dated as recently as 12 September 2026.
The news came as the Hexane.cc leak site published AI-written summaries of hundreds of thousands of the messages into categories such as racism and antisemitism, graded Low to Critical, according to local media reports.
To add to the AfD’s discomfort, reports suggest that the hacker’s access may have been gained in an embarrassingly simple fashion,his has not been independently verified
What is unusual is that the leaked emails are not published on the site directly. Instead, AI-generated summaries are shown, categorised and rated from Low to Critical. The site encourages anybody who wants to read a complete original email, including headers, message bodies, attachments, and DKIM signatures, to download it
Of course, everyone should be wary of trusting AI-generated summaries, as artificial intelligence has a history of making sometimes large mistakes with great confidence. Indeed, party sources told the media that although the leaked emails appeared to be authentic, the AI-generated summaries appeared to contain several inaccuracies.
The full corpus of 281 GB of stolen messages and files has been made available for downloadarty emails as well as more than 100,000 files
The hacker says the leak is intended to expose the party’s “degeneracy and hypocrisy.”
They have also claimed that someone with a Proton Mail email address reached out to them offering 100,000 Euros if the leak site was taken down.
Should you be tempted to download the torrent and explore the contents of the messages yourself? I would advise against it. In the past, cybercriminals have used torrents of trending topics in the public eye to distribute malware. That’s before you even consider the possible legal questions that can arise from handling stolen personal data, whatever you might think of the individuals exposed.
It’s not the first cybersecurity headache that the AfD has suffered recently. On 3 September, a press spokesman for the party’s group in the Thuringia state parliament warned that his work email account had been used to send phishing emails, and urged recipients not to open PDF attachments they may have received.
Whatever you may think of the AfD, there appear to have been security failures in this case that are far too common. It’s not unusual for websites to be overlooked or half-forgotten, and left unpatched. It’s not rare for shared infrastructure to not be segmented properly.
Furthermore, whether you are an individual or an organisation, you should be aware that an email account can be a treasure trove of sensitive information. Even if it has not been used for years, it can hold vast amounts of correspondence that can be exploited by hackers and fraudsters.
Author
Graham CLULEY
Graham Cluley is an award-winning security blogger, researcher and public speaker. He has been working in the computer security industry since the early 1990s.
