An extended deadline which hackers gave the Nationalist Party has come and gone with no further information. 

The deadline lapsed in the early hours of Saturday morning but as of 2pm, the cybercriminals’ threat to publish stolen PN documents and take down the party’s website had not yet materialised. 

A note on the hackers’ website instead noted that the next update was “coming soon”. 

Screenshot of hackers website on SaturdayScreenshot of hackers website on Saturday

Last week, the PN was given a further 192 hours, or eight days, to “communicate and cooperate” with hackers who obtained party documents and threatened to release them online.

Hackers also said they would subject the PN’s website to a Distributed Denial of Service, or DDoS attack, effectively taking it offline. 

The party has said that it will not negotiate or communicate with criminals and reiterated that stance when contacted on Saturday morning. 

A party spokesperson also dismissed claims that hackers had demanded a €5,000 payment. 

“The PN is not aware of such a request since we haven’t communicated with the hackers,” the spokesperson said.

In April, the PN revealed it was the victim of an attack on its IT systems and said that hackers may have obtained information on its servers. 

The operators of ‘Avaddon ransomware’ subsequently published a selection of documents, including employee details, passport pictures and a studio rota on the dark web- a part of the internet that is not indexed by search engines and requires special software to access. 

A PN source confirmed to Times of Malta that the documents appeared to be genuine PN data. 

Originally, the hackers gave the party 240 hours, or 10 days, to “communicate and cooperate” which had expired originally on Thursday 29 April. The hackers posted that the next update was “coming soon.”

The group’s threat is known as a “triple extortion” as it involves the threat of extortion, data theft and disabling a website.

An inquiry led by magistrate Victor Axiak into the data theft is under way. 

Replying to questions, the police said that no information can be revealed since the inquiry and police investigations are still on going. 

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