One and a half years after the sensational hacker attack on the state of Carinthia’s IT system, the Klagenfurt public prosecutor’s office has terminated the investigation. “There are no longer any leads that we are actively pursuing. “The ones we had all fizzled out,” the public prosecutor confirmed in a media report. There are no more investigation orders for the time being.
The fact that investigations have to be stopped is by no means an isolated case of cybercrime. According to the authorities, successful investigations into hacker attacks or online fraud are extremely rare. Especially when attacks occur from abroad or money is transferred to the African region. Hackers paralyzed the administration. At the end of May 2022, the Carinthian state administration was completely paralyzed for days by the hacker attack, so there were restrictions for months. The hackers got into the system via a phishing email and thus gained access to a file server. The “Black Cat” group claimed responsibility for the attack, in which at least 250 gigabytes of data were viewed. The data was primarily from the offices of members of the Carinthian state government. Around 80,000 master data sheets for settlement and residence permits, 4,000 event management contact details and internal correspondence from members of the government and employees were affected. It was not possible to say exactly how much of the data was copied. However, a 5.6 gigabyte portion of the data was published on the darknet. The hackers announced that they had resold the data because the country did not want to pay the ransom demanded – five million dollars. It is still unclear whether the data was actually sold.
source site-12