The black cat won’t let Carinthia out of its claws: After it became known on Friday that the internationally active hacker group apparently also siphoned off sensitive data and published parts of it, it turned out on Saturday that there were also eavesdroppers from the dark web at official online press appointments. Two of a total of 33 listeners who had logged in on Friday were traced back by technicians from the state administration in that part of the Internet that can only be accessed with special software.
Bizarre, but the least of the problems of the Carinthians: almost two weeks following the first hacker attack – on May 24th the entire IT of the country and the district authorities was paralyzed – the IT system is still not completely back. E-mails and federal applications such as those for issuing passports are working once more, but the homepage is still offline.
In addition, the hackers began bombarding the IT systems with targeted electronic requests in order to disable them. According to the state press service, this was repelled. Apparently, however, it was not possible to prevent around five gigabytes of data – including personal data – from entering the network. A total of 250 gigabytes are said to have been extracted from the Carinthian systems.
“By publishing parts of the data, the cybercriminals want to further increase the pressure on the country and blackmail us into paying a ransom,” emphasized the governor Peter Kaiser (SPÖ) on Saturday. “But we won’t let criminals blackmail us.”
