The Stuck, an international portal dedicated to IT and cybersecurity, reports that russian hackers did not hack the communication channels of the German military, but managed to access the conversation about Ukraine and the supply of Taurus weapons systems simply by joining the conference in WebEx (analogue of Zoom).
The Bundeswehr's information security practices have been called into question after the leak of a 38-minute audio file was obtained by simply joining the WebEx conference, the publication said.
It is noted that German military officers did not use the secure encrypted channel to talk, instead joining the call on the Cisco WebEx conference platform. Russian spies managed to intercept it.
Cisco's WebEx is often used by Bundeswehr officials for communications, according to the Heise.de report. However, an end-to-end encrypted connection cannot be established on this system when dialing a phone or browser. In many cases, IT managers need to configure and activate the function, and users need to assign these parameters.
According to some German media reports, one military man was dialing a conference from a hotel in Singapore using a mobile phone. Russian spies could just join, Stack reports.
At the same time, probably, the participants of the conversation simply ignored the fact that other unknown users are present in the conference.
That is, the reason for the leak of classified information was simple negligence and disregard for security rules by German military officials.
The incident caused outrage among German politicians. The head of the Bundestag defense committee, Marie-Agnes Strack-Zimmermann, called for increased security and counterintelligence.
As previously reported, the German Ministry of Defense confirmed the authenticity of the confidential record, and German Chancellor Olaf Scholz called it "a very serious matter."
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