In December 2023, the Thuringia accident insurance fund was the target of a cyber attack. It is now clear that extensive user data flowed into the Darknet.
The Thuringia accident insurance fund has become the target of a hacker attack. From December 16th to 17th, 2023, hackers encrypted using Ransomware not only the IT systems of the insurance company, but also stole countless data at the same time. It was initially unclear whether insured person data was also leaked. Investigators from the Forensic Service of the Thuringia State Criminal Police Office are now in Dark web came across answers, such as the Thuringia Accident Insurance Fund communicates.
Bank details and diagnoses leaked
The insurance company’s announcement shows that, in addition to data on companies that insure their employees with the accident insurance company, sensitive insured person data can now also be found on the Darknet. In addition to the names, addresses, communication data and bank details of the insured, these should contain, among other things, information on individual insurance cases – such as diagnoses and previous illnesses. The Thuringia Accident Insurance Fund explains that it is currently not possible to narrow down how many people are affected by the data theft. As the Free State’s statutory accident insurance, it has almost a million insured people.
Accident insurance company warns of phishing attacks
Cybercriminals could now use the stolen data primarily for particularly plausible phishing attacks. For example, they could pose as representatives of the Thuringia Accident Insurance Fund in fake emails or letters in order to persuade potential victims to reveal further confidential information. For this reason, the Thuringia Accident Insurance Fund asks insured persons to carefully check emails and letters that they receive on behalf of the Accident Insurance Fund and to contact the company if they have any doubts. You can find out how you can protect yourself from phishing attacks in our comprehensive guide counselor.
The sky is low over the town of Lanvéoc this Monday afternoon. And the faces are serious. Near the public school, parents wait for their children to leave the playground. The atmosphere is heavy. Everyone picks up their kids and goes home for dinner. A father joins his daughter. “It’s terrible what happened. I knew the two girls from Lanvéoc who died well. They were really nice. It’s hard to live with. »
A psychological cell
The children of two of the three victims of Lanvéoc, Océane Fournier, 26 years old and Aurélie Poulain, 30 years old, attend this small rural school. The first was the mother of a 5-year-old little girl, and the second, of two girls and a boy. The third victim, Nora Larkoub, originally from Crozon, was younger. She was 19 years old.
The shock was such that a psychological unit was set up as soon as the establishment opened. “A psychologist was responsible for establishing dialogue with those who wish it,” explains Christine Lastennet, the mayor of Lanvéoc. Children, first of all, who have heard things and who are very sensitive. But also the members of the teaching team who wish it. The goal is to help them. Prepare them for the return of these children who have lost their mothers. This is all done through words and will take time. »
Christine Lastennet is very touched. “I know the families well. It is a huge tragedy. » In recent hours, the heavy task of warning his loved ones has fallen to him. “My job provides for it. But when that happens, it’s really, really difficult. »
Patrick Berthelot, mayor of Crozon, is also in shock. “To die so young, in such conditions, is tragic. I also have a thought for these children who lost their mothers. »
“I knew one of the victims very well”
At a place called Kergoff, 500 m from Tal-ar-Groas, motorists slow down as they approach the accident. Not out of unhealthy curiosity but as if to pay homage to the three young women who died. A man walks on the road to pay his respects at the scene of the tragedy. “I knew one of the victims well, Océane, the 26-year-old girl. Since yesterday, I have heard her name several times in the town but I have not had confirmation that it is indeed her. » Two hours later, he will have the answer to this question. “He was a deeply sympathetic person. We planned to meet his daughter for the Christmas holidays. I am deeply sad. Recently, she had worked in a creperie in Crozon. I know that she was looking for another job and that she was considering leaving Lanvéoc to settle in Crozon. I didn’t know the other victims. But I sympathize with the suffering of the families. »
” Everybody is concerned “
At the Café de la Forge, a few hundred meters away, many customers talk about the accident. ” Everybody is concerned. Here, we all know each other,” declares a regular in front of his friend.
The boss talks about his brother who was supposed to open the business on Sunday morning. “He passed on the main road shortly before 7:30 a.m., the time of the tragedy. Traffic conditions were good. The road was not slippery and visibility was good. We do not understand. »
According to the information we were able to gather on site, it seems that the three friends were returning from Quimper. For a reason that remains to be determined, their vehicle veered left, uphill and in a straight line. The car ended up hitting a tree before catching fire. “I have rarely seen such a violent shock,” attests one of the professionals required for the intervention. There was almost nothing left of the interior. »
An extremely violent shock
The car in which the three friends were on Sunday morning was driving towards Châteaulin-Crozon, in an area known to be relatively accident-prone. She crossed the center line in a straight line and uphill. Then went to bite, in the opposite direction, the grassy shoulder. She ends her run, about fifty meters further on, against a tree.
There were no signs of braking at the scene, neither on the road nor on the grass.
On the other hand, the wheel tracks remain clearly visible, on the vegetation, for several tens of meters. They indicate that the vehicle, a thermal Renault Captur (a compact SUV) tilted on a slope which separates the departmental 787, going from Châteaulin to Crozon, from the greenway which serves the peninsula from east to west.
How to explain this sudden departure from the road? Did the driver fall asleep? Has she lost control of her trajectory? In this neighborhood, residents also talk about the presence of wild animals on the road. “It’s common,” comments a trader. It is not uncommon to come across deer and wild boars there. Moreover, on Sunday evening, a few hours after the accident, a motorist again collided with an animal. You really have to be wary. »
A resident interviewed also reported the sound of an explosion. Was it a tire burst or an explosion due to the fire that broke out? So many questions that should be answered by the investigation which was entrusted to the Châteaulin gendarmerie brigade.
On August 14, 2003, an explosion at the Repsol Puertollano Industrial Complex shocked the mining population. At 8:15 a.m. that day, the 112 Emergency Service received the first call from a person warning of an explosion at the refinery.
The effect of the explosion of a tank spread to other nearby ones causing a large fire. It cost the lives of nine workers and another 17 people were injured of varying degrees.
The toxic cloud worried for days. Above all, after the collapse of the last fuel tanks and the great ball of fire over the Complex, according to the chronicles of the time. The alarms activated within the Internal Emergency Plan of the complex – first the general and then the partial – would last until August 22.
Jesús Camacho was at home that day. “I heard the noise, received a call from a colleague and we ran to the company.” He was a Repsol worker and provincial secretary of the CCOO in Ciudad Real.
The workers from the maintenance and masonry contracts were starting their jobs at that time. At that time, Repsol was carrying out works to expand the facilities. “The explosion caught them in the vans,” says Camacho, who is now retired and recounts how there was a real “stampede” of employees at the petrochemical complex.
It was, he says, a “logical” reaction because those who worked at the plant “knew that everything could go to hell. They wanted to be safe because there was a whole park of tanks and next to them spheres with butane and propane that could cause a shock wave. Fortunately they had a fire system.”
The fire lasted four days. More than 800 people worked on tasks to control and put out the fire. “The firefighters from the Madrid airport even came.” The Puertollano City Council decreed six days of mourning. Today the public television of Castilla-La Mancha, CMMedia, I remembered those days and the images of the terrible fire.
An internal and an external investigation were launched after the accident. In the conclusions of the internal investigation, the company attributed the accident to “human error”. The document said that it was produced by “undue accumulation” of gases in previous days, which ended up causing the explosion. It was pointed out that the “warnings and alarms” were ignored and that “the operational decisions to correct the accumulation of gases were not attended to or adopted, although the systems to detect the problem worked correctly”.
The unions rejected this version and did not get to sign the minutes of the internal investigation. “There was a lot of tension because there were divergent issues in the final conclusions,” explains Jesús Camacho.
The workers’ representatives had an impact on “technical aspects” such as the design of this complex, “identical” to those of A Coruña or Tarragona. “The liquefaction of gases could have been avoided in a first-rate facility that is so computerized”, he assures.
“Something abnormal that should not have happened”
In October 2003, Jesús Camacho would influence the causes of the accident in an article published in the ISTAS-CCOO Occupational Health magazine. In his opinion, the release of gases from a floating roof tank, designed and prepared to contain fuel, was “something abnormal that should not have happened” and he added that “the production unit at the head of the in a destabilized way without any head of the Production department or the center’s Management ordering the immediate stoppage”, assured this trade unionist and worker at the plant throughout his working life, recalling that weeks before the incident, failures had been detected in the productive chain.
He says it was “surprising that decisions had not been made to adequately separate light hydrocarbons from gasoline, thus avoiding their arrival in an atmospheric tank.” And it is that a container of these characteristics cannot accumulate a mass of pressurized gas “that raises its roof, tilts it and releases butane and other explosive gases that, when they find a hot spot, cause a deflagration.”
This is exactly what happened and two decades later he remembers how “at that time, large companies began to replace a large part of the workforce with external contractors.” He regrets that the union proposals for introducing “modern” occupational risk prevention regulations that also reached the workers subcontracted by Repsol-YPF were not heard because “the responsibilities and obligations of the companies were dispersed.”
The case was judicially archived in criminal proceedings in April 2005. Despite the fact that the family of one of the deceased, Juan de Dios García Piña, managed to reopen the case before the Provincial Court of Ciudad Real in October of that same year, it ended dissolving in the courts, beyond the compensation to the victims for a value of about 2.6 million euros.
It probably gave rise to one of the biggest conflicts that took place at the Puertollano plant. We had been trying to carry out a negotiation on subcontractors for some time and the accident accelerated it
Juan Antonio Mata — General Secretary of CCOO Castilla-La Mancha in 2003
Juan Antonio Mata was CCOO regional secretary in 2003. “I found out about the accident from an RNE journalist who called me when I was in the car with my wife and daughters, going on vacation to her native Malaga.
He was in Puertollano for more than three days. “It was terrible, the atmosphere was bleak. I arrived at half past five in the afternoon on the 14th. We were all scared by the risk to the population”.
Later, the concern was not only to investigate the causes or clarify responsibilities, but also to “establish agreed security measures for the future.” That autumn it was time to negotiate the working conditions of the workers of the fifty Repsol YPF contracts in Puertollano. The atmosphere was very tense after what happened in August.
On August 19, 2003, during a demonstration called by the UGT and CCOO, the then general secretaries of both unions, Cándido Méndez and José María Fidalgo, respectively, were booed in the mining city. In September the workers of more than fifty companies subcontracted by Repsol-YPF joined a strike called by both unions. In October, the company had to stop the plant that Alfonso Cortina presided over at the time.
Even the PSOE announced that it would promote a bill in the Congress of Deputies to regulate subcontracting, limit temporary employment and avoid workplace accidents.
“There was a lot of pressure from CEOE because what this negotiation was going to mean was a higher cost for the main company, in terms of the work bonuses that the metal companies or other auxiliary activities in the petrochemical complexes were going to have. The fact that tasks were being outsourced to reduce costs was going to be highlighted”, recalls Jesús Camacho.
“All of this probably gave rise to one of the biggest conflicts that took place at the Puertollano plant in the month of October. We had been trying to move forward with that negotiation for some time. In the region, steps are being taken to advance in occupational prevention, especially in areas with more risks such as industrial ones, and the accident not only accelerated it but also reinforced it”, adds Juan Antonio Mata.
Both trade unionists agree in defining the moment as “extremely hard”, although the agreement was reached in mid-November. “Today any worker who enters the complex has to go through mandatory security courses to sign a contract.” Jesús Camacho also points out that that accident “forced” to change the Foreign Emergency Plan of the petrochemical complex, which depended on public administrations, because it became clear that “it was in its infancy.”
A symbolic tribute sustained in the last two decades
In 2004, the Puertollano City Council discovered a commemorative plaque on Paseo de San Gregorio, in front of the emblematic Casa de Baños, with the motto ‘The citizens of Puertollano in memory of those who have given their lives working’.
Every August 14, nine roses are deposited in the place. One for each victim of that tragedy.
José Manuel is the current provincial secretary of CCOO Ciudad Real and explains that the objective of the symbolic gesture is that this is not forgotten. The accident caught him at his home in Almodóvar del Campo, just eight kilometers from the hydrocarbon plant. “I remember very well. I was expecting my first child. You could see the column of smoke and I experienced it like the rest of the population of Puertollano and its surroundings. Panic was widespread due to the dimensions of the fire.
Today he recalled in an act that he has always wanted to be “simple and intimate” that “the families of the deceased continue to suffer their absence. We send you our encouragement.”
He was blunt when recalling that this misfortune served to “raise awareness among managers of the importance of health for workers and that it is above any productive and economic result. That was progress.”
In his opinion, it was “a before and after in the prevention of accidents at work for contractors and subcontractors who enter the complex.” In fact, he believes that the advances in coordination for occupational health and safety issues have ended up being transferred to other companies.
Accidents happen anywhere, but sometimes these oversights reach the eyes of hundreds or even thousands of people, and the problem becomes bigger. This was the case recently with , the new fighting game from Capcom that is already shining in several official tournaments, although in this precise case, the game shone for a carelessness that caused laughter… and a bit of pity.
Everything seemed normal: two players were about to face each other in a game broadcast live, when surprising everyone, a mod installed in the game showed us Chun-Li completely naked; this was not the fault of the players, but of the organizer who did not previously review the version of the game that would be used in the tournament, although the penalty was shared by all.
The commentators couldn’t contain their laughter at the surprise, and obviously, the game quickly went off the air. Immediately afterwards, the tournament was interrupted while the problem was fixed, but as we know the internet world well, the moment was immortalized and shared on social networks. As an obvious warning, this scene is not suitable for minors, so if you decide to be curious, you are on your own.
Street Fighter 6: the triumphant return of the Capcom saga
Exceeding two million units sold in record time, it broke the curse of its predecessor launched in 2016 and aims to be one of the best Capcom games in its entire history. In our review, we tell you about the great taste that the game left us, displaying not only a great combat system that will cause addiction for years, but plenty of content for those who prefer to spend countless hours outside of online mode.
As for the competitive world, will shine soon at EVO 2023, the largest fighting game tournament (which will come with several surprises), with an impressive number of more than 7,000 registered participants in the Capcom game alone. Among so many fights waiting, let’s hope that the organizers take note of this accident with Chun-Li and do not embarrass the attendees.
