Germany's CDU took IT systems offline after a serious cyberattack

The Christian Democratic Union, Germany's largest opposition party, was hit by a cyberattack over the weekend of June 1 and 2, 2024, days before voting in the European Parliament elections. The party isolated and took offline parts of its IT infrastructure as a precaution, although its public website stayed up.

Germany's Federal Ministry of the Interior confirmed the incident and described it as serious, saying authorities were working intensively to ward off the attack, investigate it and prevent further damage. The Federal Office for Information Security and the domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, were both drawn into the response, and warnings went out to the other parties represented in the Bundestag.

No attribution was made at the time. A Federal Interior Ministry spokesperson told Reuters that the way the attack was carried out pointed to a very professional actor. The incident followed an earlier compromise of the Social Democratic Party that German officials had publicly blamed on APT28, a unit tied to Russian military intelligence, and it landed during a period of near-constant attempted intrusions against German political targets.

The consequences ran long. In September 2024 the CDU's Berlin state executive committee resolved, in a document reported by Der Spiegel, that member data could not yet be fully restored and that a legally secure invitation to candidate nominations was therefore not possible. The restoration deadline slipped from mid-September to November.