The subject is serious.

It is about the security of the federal election, the foundation of democracy.

The Greens and the FDP accuse the federal government of lacking a concept to protect the federal election against disinformation and cyber attacks.

There is also talk of the federal government's failures in the IT sector.

Four men sat at the federal press conference on Wednesday to teach the public better.

Helene Bubrowski

Political correspondent in Berlin.

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Horst Seehofer, the Federal Interior Minister of the CSU, was there, as well as the President of the Protection of the Constitution Thomas Haldenwang, Arne Schönbohm, the head of the Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) and the Federal Returning Officer Georg Thiel. Seehofer summed up the message that they wanted to send that morning: "The security authorities are very, very well prepared", one has both the election campaign in view and the course of the election, all security authorities and services are pulling together here .

Who or what they have in mind and how they protect the politicians and the electorate from this, the authorities did not want to answer so concretely. They neither commented on which foreign states have an interest in influencing the Bundestag election, nor on which social network is most susceptible to the spread of false information. "The security authorities can only be successful if they are silent," said Seehofer and added: "Incidentally, that also applies to the minister." Which caused a lot of laughter in the hall, because Seehofer was always closed after the often brief answer from the head of the authorities own longer explanations - and given one or the other answer in the heat of the moment. About when he appealedto look at home in the fight against disinformation and not just to Russia, China or Iran. With that he said what the President of the Office for the Protection of the Constitution Haldenwang did not want to say, but he did not reveal a big secret either.

So far, no significant increase in hacker attacks has been observed, said BSI President Schönbohm.

However, he expressed concern about the spread of malicious programs, so-called malware, with which, for example, third-party mail accounts can be attacked.

There are hundreds of thousands of new programs of this kind every day, said Schönbohm.

Such attacks can be criminal in nature, in which case it is all about stealing money.

It becomes politically explosive when the attack is only a means to an end by spreading false information.

Hacker group is targeting German politicians

A group of hackers, called ghostwriters in security circles, is now increasingly after German politicians to send falsified information via their websites and email accounts. Since February, his authority has been observing intense attack activities against members of the Bundestag and some state parliaments, Haldenwang said. A “low three-digit number” of MPs was affected by the phishing attack. However, the attacks were rarely successful, and most parliamentarians did not open the phishing emails.

The ghostwriter group is suspected of working on behalf of the Russian military intelligence service GRU. Cyber ​​attacks in recent years in the Baltic states and Poland are said to be the result of ghostwriters. At the beginning of the year, the Twitter account of the Polish politician Marek Suski from the ruling right-wing conservative PiS party was affected. There, the hackers published pictures of a local politician in red lingerie and tweeted in Suski's name that the local politician should stop sexually harassing him and send him intimate photos. As early as 2019, the group is said to have placed false reports about Bundeswehr soldiers on a news site in Lithuania: They desecrated a Jewish cemetery and overran a Lithuanian child with a NATO tank.