BERLIN (AP) \u2014 German officials say there\u2019s no sign of concerted cyberattacks aimed at influencing the outcome of the country\u2019s upcoming election, but warned Wednesday against giving the all-clear yet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Security officials have warned over the past year that the Russian government in particular might attempt to destabilize Germany by promoting extremist parties in Sunday\u2019s vote. German Chancellor Angela Merkel has been the driving force behind maintaining international sanctions against Russia over its involvement in the conflict in Ukraine.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cWe don\u2019t see that (Russian President Vladimir) Putin has meddled in the election campaign,\u201d Germany\u2019s interior minister, Thomas de Maiziere, told mass-circulation daily Bild in an interview Wednesday. \u201cMaybe they didn\u2019t try. Maybe it\u2019s still coming.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
A spokesman for the interior ministry, Johannes Dimroth, told reporters that security officials regularly see cyberattacks against government bodies and politicians in Germany, but these haven\u2019t caused any major damage.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cLuckily we can\u2019t report any large-scale attacks. But in our view we haven\u2019t reached the point in time where we can give the all-clear,\u201d Dimroth said, citing the last-minute release of emails from Emmanuel Macron\u2019s party on the eve of the French presidential election in the spring.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Researchers have observed an increasing number of fake Twitter accounts backing the nationalist Alternative for Germany party, but believe the impact on regular voters will be small.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Luca Hammer, a data analyst working for the civil society group Fearless Democracy , said he recently identified a group of apparently automated Twitter accounts \u2014 so-called bots \u2014 that began flooding the social network with racist and anti-government messages.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The bots appeared to mimic a tactic used by far-right activists in the United States to promote Donald Trump\u2019s campaign during the U.S. presidential election last year. Unlike in the U.S., though, Twitter isn\u2019t widely used in Germany.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cOverall, it\u2019s hardly relevant,\u201d Hammer told The Associated Press. \u201cBut lots of journalists and politicians are on Twitter and for them it might create a misleading image of what the public thinks.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The view was echoed by Laura Rosenberger, a senior fellow at The German Marshall Fund of the United States. The Washington-based think tank recently launched a digital tool to monitor the Twitter activity of a network linked to the German-language account of Kremlin-controlled news website Sputnik.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\u201cEven if many people aren\u2019t seeing this directly, the ideas we see pushed around Twitter are making it into the mainstream,\u201d Rosenberger said.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Alternative for Germany, or AfD, has by far the biggest presence on social media . The party uses it to send a steady stream of anti-immigrant and anti-Merkel messages out to hundreds of thousands of followers.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Rosenberger said many of the messages seen coming from the Sputnik-linked Twitter network reflect the positions of AfD. \u201cBut we are also seeing a pattern in Germany where a lot of messages aren\u2019t about particular parties or candidates, but about sowing divisions in society and trying to exploit them,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
A spokesman for the interior ministry, Johannes Dimroth, told reporters that security officials regularly see cyberattacks against government bodies and politicians in Germany, but these haven\u2019t caused any major damage.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":7,"featured_media":55573,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-noindex":"","_yoast_wpseo_meta-robots-nofollow":"","_yoast_wpseo_canonical":"","_acf":"","_yoast_wpseo_primary_category":10,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","_smg_distribution_targets":[]},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"coauthors":[2432],"class_list":["post-27989","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cyber"],"acf":{"subheadline":"","legacy_arc_id":"DJMAHOVRUFGPPML3S2PB2ORDEM","arc_canonical_url":"\/international\/2017\/09\/20\/german-officials-see-no-sign-of-election-hacking-yet\/","remove_feature_photo":false,"is_sponsored":false,"subtype":"","redirect_url":"","disable_inline_ads":false,"native_logo_pretext":"Presented By:"},"yoast_head":"\n