According to the government, those responsible have been identified after the hacker attack on a large health insurance company in Australia.

"I am disgusted with the criminals behind this criminal act," said Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. He had authorized the National Police to disclose information about the hackers and their location. More details should be announced later in the day.

A few weeks ago, the hackers penetrated the Medibank insurance company's database and stole highly sensitive information about millions of customers. They tried to blackmail the company. However, in consultation with cyber crime experts, the latter refused to pay the ransom. A few days ago, the perpetrators then published the first sensitive data from customers on the Darknet - i.e. in the hidden part of the Internet.

Almost $10 million ransom demanded

Among other things, the medical findings and treatments of the insured had fallen into the hands of the hackers, as well as their dates of birth, telephone numbers and e-mail addresses. In the meantime, according to the AAP news agency, further data has been disclosed, apparently from alcoholic people and women who had abortions.

"We warned you that we always keep our word when we don't receive a ransom - we are releasing this data because otherwise nobody will believe us in the future," the group wrote. She announced on Thursday that she had demanded a ransom of one US dollar for each of the 9.7 million affected Medibank customers - a total of 9.7 million dollars (9.5 million euros).

Medibank had announced that the company would not pay a ransom because this in no way ensured that the data would not be published anyway. In addition, they did not want to encourage other criminals to commit similar acts, said Medibank boss David Koczkar.