AfD leak: party leadership discusses 421,000 emails, calls it "data theft"
After hundreds of thousands of internal emails were published, the AfD's federal board discussed the hack. The party said no concrete decisions were taken.
Archive image · Photo: Olaf Kosinsky / Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 3.0 de (cropped and resized)
The AfD's federal board discussed the data leak at its weekly meeting on Monday. Unknown hackers say they have posted about 421,000 internal party emails online, including messages bearing party leader Alice Weidel's sender ID. No concrete decisions were made, a party spokesman told dpa; the talks covered causes, possible perpetrators and prevention.
The spokesman called it "data theft" and a "targeted attack on a democratic political party". The AfD currently sees no security gaps that could allow further attacks, he said. The party does not comment on whether individual emails are genuine.
Reporting by ZDF frontal, Der Spiegel and Der Standard with the OCCRP network has used the material to raise new questions about Swiss donations to Weidel's Lake Constance district branch in 2017; Weidel has not revised her statements, her spokesman said. Prosecutors in Konstanz had dropped an investigation into her.