BERLIN—German authorities were investigating the leak of private data belonging to hundreds of politicians in one of the country’s largest cyber leaks.
The leak affected Chancellor Angela Merkel, according to German authorities. A government spokeswoman said no sensitive information regarding the government or Ms. Merkel was leaked.
The disclosure also appeared to target German celebrities, journalists and artists, according to posts published on a Twitter account that appeared to have been used as the main channel to spread the data. The account was later suspended.
The incident will likely heighten concerns about cybersecurity in Germany. The country has among the most onerous privacy legislation in the world and has experienced repeated attacks in the past, including a vast data theft targeting lawmakers in 2015, which authorities since blamed on Russia.
“The federal government is taking the incident very seriously,” said the government spokeswoman.
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All political parties were hit by the latest disclosure except the anti-immigrant Alternative for Germany, or AfD, according to a person familiar with the investigation. An AfD spokesman confirmed the party wasn’t affected by the data leak. All the other parties said they were still gathering information about it.
Public broadcaster rbb, which first reported the leak Friday, said hackers leaked mobile numbers and addresses but also internal party documents from hundreds of members the Bundestag, parliament’s lower house, as well as information such as credit-card details, bills and chats with family members.
According to the report, the data was leaked before Christmas but only noticed Thursday. The suspended Twitter account showed posts linking to data archives stretching back to Dec. 1 and repeating daily in the manner of an advent calendar, which is popular among children in Germany in the run-up to Christmas.
The German Federal Office for Information Security said it was working closely with other authorities to verify the extent of the data leak. According to the current state of the investigation, government networks weren’t affected, the office said.
The incident follows a string of cyberattacks on both German politicians and companies that has raised alarm bells in Berlin and prompted the government to step up defenses of firms that are most vulnerable.
In 2015, the Bundestag suffered an extensive breach, leading to the theft of several gigabytes of data by what German security officials believe were Russian cyber thieves. In February 2018, the government’s highly protected computer network was also attacked.
Who was behind the latest leak and what their motives were remain unclear. A spokesman for the interior ministry said part of the leaked data was old, which could explain why AfD politicians weren’t targeted as the party only entered the Bundestag in 2017. The spokesman also said it is unclear if the data were gathered through one or multiple hacks or leaked by one or several people. Authorities learned about the incident on Thursday, he said.
According to the suspended Twitter account, German actors, musicians and moderators were among those affected by the leak. The popular Bild tabloid, which said it had secured the entire leaked documents and was considering whether to publish some of them, wrote that numerous journalists were also among the victims.
—Andrea Thomas contributed to this article.
Write to Ruth Bender at Ruth.Bender@wsj.com
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