A Munich penetration testing firm is running Berlin’s stolen files through open-weight AI models on its own hardware. Sascha Herzog of NSIDE ATTACK LOGIC told iX that his team uses models such as Qwen, operated purely locally, to pre-sort the Rhysida dump for its customers. One search run across the archive takes twelve to fifteen hours.
That is what I described on September 8 in RAIV in Berlin Says the Senate Has Time for Breach Triage. Ten RAIV (GPU rigs) of used video cards would have cost 35,000 euros, and finished in two weeks, while keeping the data in Berlin. The Senate’s Chief Digital Officer had told the Innenausschuss that “AI tools” would rank the files by risk. A private firm in the far away state of Bavaria has now shown that local open-weight models carry the work.
Herzog also reports he has hit some limits, which are well known. His model marked a document as classified because it contained the word “geheim” (secret). I mean, it does have the word secret. Context is hard. He says his customers in some cases assign staff for a week to read the filtered files by hand, which sounds light to this historian. Can you imagine if Germany had used that attitude to read their own archives? Just think of what would have happened to Siemens. Anyway, the AI model sorts and people do an actual finding, which is the division of labor a Berlin RAIV was built for. It’s not unlike how archaeologists and war crimes investigators work. They fly a plane over, using modern tools like radar, land and then dig by hand.
His download took two and a half weeks over Tor, while Rhysida rearranged the file structure three times. He reports only 5.25 terabytes and 1.431 million files. The archive published in September ran to 1.44 million. About nine thousand files are unaccounted for. Herzog says either his download missed them or Rhysida changed the archive after publishing, and he can’t say which. He says his firm has yet to analyze any of the 7-Zip archives inside the dump.
Herzog also makes the rather bizarre and unsafe comment that he personally feels that Berlin should have paid a ransom. What? What? Why? His argument is that the harm comes from publication. Rhysida took the data between August 7 and 12 and held it for three weeks before the deadline passed, but Rhysida sells to whoever pays. Whoever. Payment buys nothing but a promise from a criminal with zero enforcement. A paid Rhysida still has the files and still has a buyer, and can still leak. This is not news to anyone, hopefully.
Herzog then describes his work as a product. Customers name email domains, project names and keywords. His analyzer sells them the hits. The matching files are packaged and sent to the customer with a preliminary report and an HTML index that links to each file. Those files include the emails exchanged with two Senate administrations. They carry the names, addresses and words of Senate staff and of every other party on the thread. That seems rather broad, no? This guy is a leak administrator over all of it?
The legal basis receives one sentence in the interview:
we of course always observe the necessary legal framework.
How? Explain! But the interviewer moves on, leaving the most crucial detail unexplained. Herzog is handing leaked files to his customers on what basis? I turned down requests for hosting a free mirror of the dump just for journalists in September for exactly this reason. A copy of stolen files means holding a copy of third parties’ data, right?
Herzog says he saw data on critical infrastructure operators outside his customer base and calls them enormously affected. He says he is in contact with federal agencies and declines to say more. Again the interview moves on, and leaves open whether anyone has told those operators. Do they know he’s telling people other than them, if they don’t know themselves?
The interview is a bust. It ultimately skips the findings that matter most to Berlin, perhaps because, I don’t know, the expert sits in Bavaria? Does that explain anything?
The 21 administrative passwords that only vendors can change go unmentioned.
So do the Payone credentials and the water supply vulnerability analyses, and the intrusion detection budget the CDU-SPD coalition cut.
The article states that Berlin found the intrusion while investigating a domain controller fault on August 13. The interviewer never asks why a fault found what monitoring missed. Herzog’s advice to affected companies is boring and bog-standard: ask the authorities, warn staff about phishing, check what the leak says about your IT, tell the others on the thread.
Rotating every credential that touched the Senate, THE MOST IMPORTANT STEP, goes unmentioned.
The Senate told the Innenausschuss it needed AI tools. A firm in Munich has them running on local hardware and sells the leak without a clearly stated legal basis. The duty to tell the people in those files? Where does that sit, Berlin?