Josef “Joe” Kalina – pollster, advertising professional, communications guru. His good connections to politics, authorities and business have now apparently made the 66-year-old a target for cyber criminals. The servers of his Vienna PR agency UNIQUE Relations were hacked – 49.47 gigabytes of data were stolen and the jack-of-all-trades was blackmailed.
The attackers are said to be the “Qilin” group, who usually rent out their software in order to plunder networks with lucrative data sets. In the current case, the “successful attack” on Kalina’s company was reported on the darknet on November 5, 2023. Employees raised the alarm early in the morning. “We got the matter under control quickly,” asserts Josef Kalina in an interview with “Krone”, after An employee could not access any documents or drives early in the morning and raised the alarm. “We immediately reported this to the police and the data protection authority and called in a cyber specialist.” The fact is that the virtual intruders demanded a ransom from the Viennese entrepreneur, or more precisely Bitcoins, in order not to sell the documents – including politically explosive ones – on to the highest bidder. But nothing was paid, says Kalina. “We do daily system backups and were able to ward off further attacks. Nothing was published that was compromising in any way.” “These bombings are widespread.” Kalina does not believe that it is a targeted cyber attack. “There is an organization behind this. This is about widespread bombings.” Domestic security expert Cornelius Granig points out that, especially in the super election year of 2024, there is a particularly high risk of cyber attacks being ordered by criminals, and warns: “Encrypt your sensitive data and strengthen it Security precautions to ensure that criminals do not misuse the data.”
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