The fallout for the breach of key lawmakers is continuing. Now, reports are surfacing that police have conducted a raid.
Late last week, we brought you news of a data breach that impacted lawmakers, journalists, and celebrities. The breach managed to even affect German Chancellor Angela Merkel. While the breach itself isn’t actually that big, it is proving to be one of the most politically damaging ones out there.
In response, German Cyber Security Defence agency, the BSI, found themselves on the defence following the breach. Many are already questioning if there is any kind of deficiency in securing various politicians. The BSI said that, although they had reports of a single person seeing suspicious activity, they had no way of connecting other politicians to the breach until the whole data set was posted.
Today, we are learning of even more dramatic fallout from the breach. German police have conducted a raid on a teenagers house. The teenager in question was additionally questioned by police over his potential involvement in the breach. Allegedly, the raid came about because the teenager suggested at some point that he knew Orbit, the alleged hacker behind the breach. From ITPro:
Germany’s state broadcaster, ARD, reported that the teenager was questioned “for several hours” as a potential witness. Jan S has denied he was behind the hack, but has claimed to know the real identity of the hacker “Orbit”, who claimed responsibility on social media.
The leaked data, which was first published over the Christmas period but only discovered last week, is said to contain personal phone numbers, correspondence, credit card details belonging to hundreds of political figures, including Chancellor Angela Merkel, and internal documents belonging to Germany’s political parties.
This was eventually leaked across Twitter in a style similar to an advent calendar, with fresh information being revealed each day.
One thing is for sure, this is definitely a fast police response to a breach. Often, when a breach occurs, it takes months or even years before we hear about any arrests or raids. In this case, it took merely days before we heard about fallout from the breach.
We’ll keep monitoring this story which is evolving rather quickly.
Drew Wilson on Twitter: @icecube85 and Google+.
