Merkel office’s computers hit by cyberattack — report

A computer in German Chancellor Angela Merkel’s legislative office was hit by a cyberattack that targeted the country’s lower house of parliament in May, the Bild newspaper reported on Sunday.

The daily, which did not cite its sources, said the cyberattack was broader and greater than originally anticipated and the Bundestag struggled to control it.

The attack “infected” one of the computers in Merkel’s Bundestag office. Bild said the computer was one of the first on which the Trojan Horse-style attack was discovered.

According to the newspaper, the discovery was made on Friday, with officials finding the Trojan Horse software on five computers in the Bundestag.

A spokesman for Merkel’s conservative CDU bloc told the newspaper he could “not confirm nor deny” the report.

It was not immediately clear who was responsible for the cyberattack.

Merkel’s official website, as well as those of the government and the Bundestag, were blocked in January in an online attack claimed by a pro-Russian group.

Last week, three European hotels hosting negotiations between Iran and world powers over limiting Iran’s nuclear program were targeted by a computer virus widely believed to be used as spyware by Israel, according to a leading cyber-security firm.

The unnamed hotels each were targeted by a version of the Duqu virus about two weeks before hosting the negotiations, the Wall Street Journal reported last week, citing researchers at the cyber-security firm Kaspersky Lab ZAO, based in Moscow.

According to the Wall Street Journal, Kaspersky checked thousands of computers in other European hotels, all of them coming up clean – and it also quoted “current and former US officials and many cybersecurity experts (as believing that) Duqu was designed to carry out Israel’s most sensitive intelligence-collection operations.”

The report did not offer any specific evidence of the allegations.