Germany blames Russia for Signal phishing attacks on MPs

Top officials in the German government on Saturday blamed Russia for repeated phishing attacks targeting lawmakers and senior administration officials using the Signal messaging app.

"The federal government is assuming that the phishing campaign targeting the Signal messaging service was presumably run from Russia," AFP learned from a government source.

The source said that the phishing campaign had been stopped.

German prosecutors on Friday launched a spying investigation into the cyberattacks which had allegedly been directed at MPs from several parties including the speaker of parliament and a senior member of Chancellor Friedrich Merz's CDU party.

Civil servants, diplomats and journalists were also targeted.

Germany, Kyiv's biggest provider of military aid, has been battling a surge of cyberattacks, as well as espionage and sabotage plots since Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022.

Moscow denies being behind any such actions.

The attacks work by sending messages purporting to come from Signal support.

Victims are urged to hand over sensitive account information, which the attackers can then use to gain access to their chat groups and messages.

When the scam is successful, the hackers gain access to photos and files shared on Signal and can also impersonate the person whose account was compromised.

Many have moved from WhatsApp to the non-profit Signal in recent years because of privacy concerns after WhatsApp said it would share some metadata with parent company Meta, which also owns Facebook and Instagram.