500,000 records affected: Red Cross attacked by hackers

This is data about refugees or missing persons: In a cyberattack on the International Red Cross, hackers obtained more than 500,000 information about people in special need of protection.

The International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) has been attacked by unknown hackers. In doing so, they captured the data of more than 515,000 particularly vulnerable people, as announced by the organization. These include “people who have been separated from their families due to conflict, migration and disasters, missing persons and their families, and those detained”. The attack was discovered “this week” and it is not clear who was behind it.

The hackers were targeting an outside company in Switzerland that was storing data on behalf of the ICRC. These come from about 60 national Red Cross and Red Crescent agencies. The biggest concern of the ICRC now is that this information could be made public or it could be misused. This makes the suffering and suffering of families even more unbearable and poses an even greater risk for vulnerable people. However, there is no evidence yet that the data has become public, the organization said.

“We are shocked and shocked that this human information has been attacked and exposed,” said ICRC Director-General Robert Mardini. He appealed to the hackers not to pass on the data.