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Data breach at major Swedish software supplier impacts 1.5M(bleepingcomputer.com)
57 points by fleahunter 2 days ago | 20 comments
  • cv50052 days ago

    This data is publically available to anyone in Sweden:

    Your salary (well, last years taxable income), debts/credit rating, criminal history, address, phone number, which vehicles and properties you own and which company boards you're on.

    One of organized criminals biggest income these days are scamming rich old folks because it's so trivial to get all details needed (and who to target) to be a pretty convincing bankman, IRS type agent/etc.

    Some of it you have to kind of manually request at various places, but it's all available.

    So data breaches aren't really that big of a deal when everything is already public.

    • reppap2 days ago |parent

      Afaik this breach also contained a lot of data about medical condition related to workplaces.

    • zith2 days ago |parent

      If I understand correctly the only thing not public that was leaked was the role each person had in the government.

      • tuwtuwtuwtuw2 days ago |parent

        Why would the role within the government not be public? I can't imagine that being treated as a secret.

    • naIak2 days ago |parent

      [flagged]

      • victorbjorklunda day ago |parent

        Europe is not one country. It’s like seeing Tornados in Kansas and assuming that is all of US

      • arianvanpa day ago |parent

        Sweden*

        Non of this is public in Germany or Netherlands

  • toomuchtodo2 days ago

    Miljödata is an IT systems supplier for roughly 80% of Sweden's municipalities. The company disclosed the incident on August 25, saying that the attackers stole data and demanded 1.5 Bitcoin to not leak it.

    Related:

    https://www.bleepingcomputer.com/news/security/it-system-sup...

    https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/cyberattack-i-datasystem-...

    • SiempreViernes2 days ago |parent

      Then nobody paid and pii was published, now an integrity agency is starting an investigation

      https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/integritetsmyndigheten-in...

  • cncrndnetizen2 days ago

    Yet another sign that governments and corporations should support SECURE programming language development and treat it like other (critical) infrastructure.

    • tetha2 days ago |parent

      I'd rather say we need more cyber anarchy and chaos within Europe. We need security researchers and the CCC and similar organizations with an absolute freedom to hack everything in Europe.

      Get into everything, break every security control in Europe, be a pain. As long as function is not impacted, and security problems are reported responsibly. Don't DoS a power plant because you think you can, and face a judge if you do.

      That's what foreign powers are doing and slowly collecting as preparation for the future, and that's the only real way to increase cyber security across the board.

      • dmix2 days ago |parent

        You'll have to pay for that if you're going to have people as motivated as the adversaries.

    • marginalia_nu2 days ago |parent

      Most of the Swedish public sector runs on Java. Problem is it's, like public infrastructure in general, more attractive to build than to maintain.

      Doesn't matter what language you use if you don't actually maintain the software.

      • pksebben2 days ago |parent

        It matters at least a little. Ceteris parabus, I'd prefer unmaintained rust code over unmaintained java.

        That said, I'd also prefer maintained java over unmaintained rust, so I do see your point.

    • victorbjorklund2 days ago |parent

      We don’t know what happened but rumor is it was a file that was uploaded for an integration and that the server wasn’t secured. Same would have happened no matter if using Rust or any other language.

    • alistairSH2 days ago |parent

      Is there any indication this breach was related to the language used? Or was it something "higher level" like unsecured DB or S3 bucket or similar?

    • shakna2 days ago |parent

      In the past, Datacarry has almost exclusively used phishing as their first penetration of systems. (Exploits follow for escalation, but not generally penetration.)

      Whilst we don't know exactly what they did here, a secure programming language will do bupkus when you're targeting the meatbag behind the keyboard. We need to treat people like infrastructure, that can and will eventually fail.

    • november1232 days ago |parent

      Statistically PII leaks are due to not secure business logic bugs. Not because of unsafe memory handling of a programming language.

      Unauthorized API always leaks.

    • vbezhenar2 days ago |parent

      PHP was developed 30 years ago.

    • LtWorf2 days ago |parent

      Was the leak due to a stack overflow, double free or similar issue?