Major security breach in Germany. The German armed forces have disconnected from the Internet a connection to the Webex video conferencing service, a similar platform to Zoom, after a security breach that left data from more than 6,000 video conference meetings of the German armed forces visible on the network by Friday evening, Zeit Online revealed on Saturday, quoted by EFE, according to Agerpres.
The German weekly notes that experts have been scrambling for days to delete video conference meetings that took place in the past, some of which were classified as secret because they covered topics such as the Taurus and Meteor missiles or discussions on the “digital battlefield.”
Thus, among the visible information coming from these video conferences were the date, time and duration, the person who convened the meeting and the topic of the meeting.
In addition, the links to the personal digital meeting rooms of the 248,000 members of the German armed forces were organized in an identifiable pattern and were not password protected either.
Thus, for example, Zeit Online managed to find, among other things, the digital meeting room of Ingo Gerhartz, the head of the air force.
Gerhatz was one of the participants in the March virtual conversation between four German officers regarding the Taurus missiles that was leaked to the Russian media and which, as German Defense Minister Boris Pistorius said at the time, may have been recorded because of a “ individual errors” of a participant when he connected from another country without taking the necessary precautions.
The German armed forces organize, according to their own data, 45,000 meetings per month.
The Federal Office for Information Security (BSI) approved the Webex platform for general use by authorities in 2019 and certified it against its cloud computing criteria catalog.
Zeit Online warns that the connections of German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, and the Ministries of Finance, Research and Economy have been or continue to be affected.
Thus, the German weekly was able to connect this Saturday to the digital meeting rooms of Scholz and the Minister of Economy, Robert Habeck, while that of the Minister of Finance, Christian Lindner, was closed in the meantime.
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