Polish PM’s chief of staff confirms his email account hacked after documents appear online

Michał Dworczyk, the head of the chancellery of Poland’s prime minister, has confirmed that private email accounts belonging to him and his wife were hacked. However, despite alleged leaks of documents online, he said that no classified information had been at risk.

The alleged cyberattack, which Dworczyk said was part of a “large-scale disinformation campaign”, is the latest in a series of apparent hacks of accounts belonging to senior figures associated with the ruling Law and Justice (PiS) party.

On Tuesday, a post appeared on the Facebook account of Agnieszka Dworczyk, with information about the hack, along with a link to view the allegedly stolen documents. Written as if by her husband, the post said that Michał Dworczyk’s email had been “hacked by unknown persons”.

Source: Facebook via Wirtualna Polska

It claimed that “official documents that contain classified information” had been stolen and could be “used to harm the national security” of Poland as well as serve “as evidence of alleged Polish interference in Belarus’s internal affairs”.

Onet, a news website, reported that the linked documents contained Dworczyk’s alleged correspondence with Hubert Królikowski, who heads the department for defence analysis in the prime minister’s chancellery, on measures to facilitate the settlement of Belarusians in Poland last year.

However, Dworczyk, in a statement released last night, said that there had been no classified, restricted, secret or top secret information in the mailbox. He added that “relevant state agencies” are investigating the “cyberattacks”.

Dworczyk also said that the post on his wife’s profile, which quickly disappeared, had been “fabricated and contained untrue content”. He explained that he “treats the attack as one of the elements of a large-scale disinformation campaign including falsified and manipulated information”.

He noted a link between the “Russian social media service Telegram” – where the documents purporting to be from his account have been posted – and the fact that he had been barred from entering Belarus and Russia for 11 years over “active support for the democratic changes” in former Soviet states.

However, Dworczyk, who as well being the head of the prime minister’s office also holds ministerial rank, did not explicitly confirm or deny whether any of the documents are genuine.

Niebezpiecznik, a cybersecurity news site, reports that files purportedly from the minister’s mailbox began appearing on Telegram, an instant-messaging service, on Friday.

However, it noted that disinformation campaigns often include a mixture of genuine and falsified documents and also pointed out that the available documents – whether real or not – do not appear to contain much sensitive information.

The website warned that it believes “the group attacking Polish politicians has captured more mailboxes belonging to them and their relatives”, and could leak further documents in the future.

In recent months, a number of social media accounts belonging to senior figures associated with the ruling PiS party, including two government ministers, have reportedly been hacked.

In January, the Twitter account of a senior PiS MP, Marek Suski, posted intimate photographs of another politician. He claimed to be the victim of a hack that may be part of “hybrid warfare” launched by a neighbouring country against Poland.

In the same month, a deputy development minister, Iwona Michałek, who is from one of PiS’s coalition partners, also said that her Twitter account had been hijacked after it posted messages critical of PiS, including an image of party leader Jarosław Kaczyński behind bars.

In December, a vulgar and racist post appeared on the Facebook page of the family and social policy minister Marlena Maląg. She later announced that her account had been hacked and the case reported to prosecutors.

In November, another PiS MP, Marcin Kamil Duszek, said his Facebook account had been hacked after it posted a photo of him in a car alongside a young woman with the words “meet this beauty…She will be my new secretary…My fellow MPs will be jealous”.

Three other PiS politicians – Joanna Borowiak, Arkadiusz Czartoryski, and Andrzej Melak – have also claimed to have had their social media accounts hijacked.

Main image credit: Krystian Maj/KPRM/Flickr (under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

Maria Wilczek

Maria Wilczek is deputy editor of Notes from Poland. She is a regular writer for The Times, The Economist and Al Jazeera English, and has also featured in Foreign Policy, Politico Europe, The Spectator and Gazeta Wyborcza.