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Around a third of these cases – 33.9 percent – were resolved. This was announced by Interior Minister Gerhard Karner (ÖVP) on Tuesday at a press conference in Vienna. In addition to the ever-reaching digitalization, he also attributed the increase to the increased willingness of the victims to report crimes.
“Almost half of the reported cases are fraud offenses on the Internet”, said the Minister of the Interior. There were also strong increases in hacker attacks and hate on the Internet, with the number of ads under the Prohibition Act also rising sharply. As an example, Karner brought up a subject by Anne Frank that played down the Holocaust and that was found on the mobile phone of an eleven or twelve-year-old.
The Ministry of the Interior referred to the planned tightening of the law and the planned criminal service reform, the implementation of which is to begin this year. The penalties for hackers are to be increased, the assessment for this was completed in April. He hopes and assumes that the amendment to the law will be passed in the fall.
Karner welcomed the announcement by Justice Minister Alma Zadic (Greens) that she intended to incorporate the tightening of penalties for depicting abuse by minors. The criticism was mainly directed against the fact that the tightening would also or primarily affect many underage perpetrators – for example, because it is punishable if a 14-year-old gets an explicit photo of his 13-year-old girlfriend on his cell phone. “We want the law to be a big hit”Karner said.
On the one hand, the criminal service reform is about expanding the cybercrime competence center C4 in the Federal Criminal Police Office to ultimately 120 officers. “But we also need broad-based expertise”, explained the Minister of the Interior. The competence for IT investigations should therefore also be strengthened in the district police headquarters.
In addition, there is the training, as Karner, the Director General for Public Safety, Franz Ruf, and Federal Criminal Police Office Director Andreas Holzer pointed out. Among other things, the Minister of the Interior addressed the Cyber-HAK in Tamsweg, to which a similar school in Horn is to be added in the autumn, which should also be conducive to the recruitment of additional investigative specialists. Ruf emphasized the need to secure the expertise of external forces for cyber investigations. For this purpose, special contract schemes have now been implemented and the remuneration of these specialists can be adapted to the scheme of the private sector.
“But the most important thing is self-protection”Karner said. “It goes without saying that everyone locks their apartment when they leave it. But he doesn’t do that on the internet.” A lot of effort is therefore put into prevention: the Minister of the Interior named a roadshow in Lower Austria with the Federation of Industry and the Chamber of Commerce to educate companies as an example, the project “Safe together” and the project “under 18”, in which the Federal Criminal Police Office, the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Education specifically address children and young people. Among other things, this involves raising awareness of criminal behavior.
Source: Nachrichten
