Hackers lurking, parliamentarians told

"Hackers lurking, parliamentarians told," Deutsche Welle

Germany's BSI data security agency has warned German political parties to guard against cyber hackers, according to a German media consortium. At a briefing they were told that Russian groups were suspected.

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Russia 'very innovative'

Marcel H. Van Herpen, who heads the Cicero Foundation, a Dutch think tank which advises the EU, wrote late last month in the German parliamentary magazine "APUZ" that Russian "disinformation" had become "very innovative" under President Vladimir Putin, a former KGB agent once stationed in communist East Germany.

"That relates to the extremely lavish budget for the propaganda work of the Kremlin, the far-reaching modernization of the Russian propaganda machinery, the use of psychological know-how and the relative openness of the Western media world" to influence Western political decision-making, Van Herpen said.

The Dutch expert said a long-running subject at Russia's military academies was the Chinese method of "Sunzi" or "the art of warfare", developed in around 500 years BC, that used deception to erode resistance and defeat the enemy "without having to fight a battle."

He advised Western governments to significantly raise their budgets for "public diplomacy." These had been severely trimmed over the past 10 years while Russia had "constantly raised" its funding for its "propaganda machinery."