Hosting Provider Breach Exposes 345,000 Email Addresses Linked to German Political Party AfD

A cyberattack on the hosting provider of Alternative for Germany (AfD) has exposed hundreds of thousands of confidential emails and attachments, along with more than 345,000 unique email addresses. Have I Been Pwned confirmed the scale of the breach after AfD publicly disclosed the September attack last week. The party said only a few email accounts were illegally copied, but admitted that a large amount of data was taken from them.

According to an investigative report by journalist Lilith Wittmann, which cites the attackers and party sources, the incident was first spotted on September 9 and began with a poorly protected WordPress site. The report also claimed the attackers kept access to servers run by the AfD-owned hosting provider, Alternita Dienstleistungs GmbH, and took more than a terabyte of data. No official source has verified these claims about how the attack unfolded, and The Register has asked the provider for comment.

The stolen emails were published on an activist website that used AI to summarise them into searchable topics. AfD said affected account owners have been notified and that it reported the attack to security authorities. The party also argued that the AI analysis relied on keywords rather than context, and that the alleged scandals do not stand up to scrutiny.