Top secret Taurus missile meetings leaked online in security lapse

Top secret German military meetings about Taurus missiles were easily accessible online, reflecting a serious lapse in security, it has emerged.

An investigation by Die Zeit newspaper found that details of over 6,000 past and future meetings were accessible on the internet. They included the subject matter of the meeting and the names of its participants.

While it’s not thought hackers had access to actual recordings of past discussions, they could have attempted to gain access to them with the details available online.

The security flaws were found in the video conferencing software Webex, with information being hosted on internal Bundeswehr servers. The URL links to conferences included a simple series of consecutive numbers, which would have been easily guessable by hackers, said the team from Netzbegruendung, a group of IT experts affiliated with the Greens Party.

Among the meetings that were at risk were ones labelled “sensitive”. They included discussions on Taurus cruise missiles, Meteor air-to-air missiles and the “digital battlefield”.

The findings by the German broadsheet, with help from Netzbegruenung, also detailed that would-be hackers would have been able to access online meetings involving Olaf Scholz, the German chancellor, Robert Habeck, the vice chancellor and Christian Lindner, the finance minister.

Some meetings, including one involving top Luftwaffe general Ingo Gerhartz, were accessible without a password.

One of those by Gerhartz was recently leaked by pro-Kremlin social media in March. In it, Gerhartz was heard discussing a strike on the Kerch bridge between the occupied Crimean peninsula and mainland Russia.

Berlin called the leak a “hybrid disinformation attempt”.

Responding to the Zeit report, Konstantin von Notz, the chair of the Bundestag’s parliamentary oversight committee said the defence ministry had a “serious problem” with security.

“It’s once again clear that in the face of new daily hybrid attacks, we need to actually implement the ‘Zeitenwende’,” von Notz said.

Speaking to the Telegraph last week, before the security weaknesses were public, von Notz warned that Germany faces “almost daily... destabilisation attempts by authoritarian states against our country”.

The Bundeswehr has admitted weaknesses in its digital security and said that it has now tightened its online security.

“It was not possible to participate in the video conferences without the knowledge of the participants or without authorisation,” a spokesperson for the military said. “No confidential content could therefore leave the conferences” they claimed.

The Bundeswehr refused to comment if this was the same security issue that caused the leak in March.