Hackers Leak 421,000 Internal Alternative for Germany Emails

The Alternative für Deutschland (AfD) is investigating a massive cyberattack from September 2026 that resulted in the theft and publication of approximately 421,179 internal emails and over 100,000 files. The breach, which targeted the party's hosting provider potentially through an unpatched website, totaled 281 gigabytes of data. The leaked archive includes bank statements, invoices, identity documents, and private correspondence from senior figures including co-chair Alice Weidel and honorary chairman Alexander Gauland.

The stolen data was published on the Hexane.cc leak site, where the attacker used AI to categorize messages by themes such as racism and antisemitism, rating them from low to critical. While the party claims many of the compromised mailboxes had been inactive for years, the archive contains messages dated as recently as September 12, 2026. The hacker stated the leak intended to expose the party's "degeneracy and hypocrisy."

The AfD condemned the breach as an attack on democracy and contested the accuracy of the AI-generated summaries. The leak occurs as the party's polling popularity has reached 30 percent, while civil liberties organizations like Gesellschaft fuer Freiheitsrechte suggest the leaked materials could strengthen legal efforts to ban the party for promoting extremism.