The cyberattack on Alternative for Germany (AfD), the country’s most prominent far-right political party, exposed hundreds of thousands of confidential emails and attachments, as well as more than 345,000 unique email addresses. Have I Been Pwned confirmed the scale of the breach for the first time today, after AfD officially disclosed the September attack on its hosting provider last week. AfD said in its statement that “only a few email accounts were illegally copied,” but admitted a large amount of the data was taken from them, resulting in an extensive data breach. The emails were added to what the party described as “an activist website,” which summarised the email chains into searchable topics and has led to the publication of various revelations, such as a party co-leader’s opinions on colleagues’ “deeply problematic” racial discourse. Per a report from investigative journalist Lilith Wittmann, citing conversations with the cybercriminals responsible for the hack-and-leak job and party sources, the attack was first spotted on September 9 and started with a compromise of a poorly protected WordPress site. The same report claimed the criminals gained persistent access to the servers operated by the hosting provider, identified as AfD-owned Alternita Dienstleistungs GmbH, and exfiltrated more than a terabyte of data. No official sources have verified the hackers’ claims about how the attack unfolded. The Register contacted Alternita Dienstleistungs for its take. AfD said the owners of the affected email accounts have been notified, and that it reported the attack to security authorities. “We are deeply concerned by what has happened,” the party said in an October 20 statement. “Such a digital attack is illegal and a criminal offense. Furthermore, it is an attack on the German party system and thus on democracy. “We are extremely worried that, apparently, the content of the stolen documents was analyzed using a very rudimentary AI. This analysis focused on keywords, not the context. The alleged scandals published so far do not stand up to scrutiny – a fact that, thankfully, is being confirmed by a growing number of commentators on social media.” Among the AI-generated summaries compiled by the “activist site” are chains supposedly expressing views related to Holocaust denial, racist and antisemitic rants, the 9/11 disaster, forged documents, and more. Der Spiegel sifted through the raw files and reported that party leader Alice Weidel seemingly knew about illegal donations related to the 2017 federal elections weeks before she previously said she did. The AfD’s position is that the AI summaries of the emails are not to be trusted, but it has not specifically commented on the veracity of the raw email files available for download via torrent. It did not immediately respond to our request for input, but has told reporters previously that it will not comment on whether the emails, or the stories that have been written based on them, are to be trusted. ®