Ok, some important context for non-Swedes. Anyone can get access to all Swedish (non-protected but those are a very VERY small subset) personal identification numbers by simply signing an agreement with SPAR[1] (the Swedish national people database). Identification numbers per se are not particularly useful or hard to get, they are effectively public information. Using SPAR you can also get the home (and any additional) addresses of individuals
A Swedish citizen database is... you know. fun. But not exactly hard to get hold of.
[1] https://www.statenspersonadressregister.se/master/start/engl...
Swedish news has some quotes from authorities that nothing of value has been leaked, and a quote from the service CGI that it only concerns test servers.[1][2]
[1]: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/uppgift-statlig-it-inform...
[2]: https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/news/cybersakerhet/cgi-informerar-...
As a Swede this is giving me shudders, the statements reeks of paper-pushers and certification-chasers that don't seem to understand fundamental risks of how how threat actors can move around once having established footholds, hopefully there's more competent people down in the trenches.
Are we allowed to vibe code some positive changes and submit them for review?
The source code is the least of it! From the article:
> citizen PII databases and electronic signing documents were also collected but are being sold separately
Yeah the source code isn't really such a big deal aside from helping to find vulnerabilities. The PII is a real disgrace.
Man, you've got to be a real low-life to sell all of that.
You've got to be a real low-life to collect all of that and put it in a database that is not air-gapped.
It's something akin to a service provider in SAML parlance, if we are to believe reporting. How can it be air-gapped?
And if we are to believe the hacked company, it is a development environment with test data in it. That remains to be seen, but is a risky thing to lie about. If there is production data in the leak, we will surely know about it.
At the high end you can use data diodes to isolate critical data.
The point of a system like this is specifically that it’s accessible and not air gapped.
Being able to validate that a citizen is a citizen and their ID is valid inherently requires the system be accessible
You can, they didn't; big difference.
If you need the data, you cannot have it air gapped. And if it is air gapped, it is still easy to make misstakes.
"misstakes", love it, almost peotic
It was mainly an explanation, that "airgapping" does not magically provides better security, or is required (or possible) to use at all here.
Imagine if the bank took such a cavalier attitude with the contents of my account.
Encryption keys are mentioned as well.
I wonder if the focus on source code makes Swedish news slower to jump on this. I haven't seen it in domestic news yet. (Haven't looked too wide though)
I saw it on SVT a few hours ago. DN and Expressen have also reported. The details about what exactly it is that got leaked are unclear (some report it's basically the code and certs responsible for BankID SSO) but this is certainly being reported domestically.
In Aftonbladet comments from CGI they seem to think that no production related data has been leaked:
https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/ArvG0E/cgi-sverige-uppg...
But a copy of production data in the test environment isn't production data... It's test data! :)
As if it ever happened that a breached company admitted immediately that they've just been fucked.
some report it's basically the code and certs responsible for BankID SSO
No. CGI has nothing to do with BankID.
IMO the most credible reports suggest that the source code and data involved are related to these four services:
https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/e-tjanst... "Mina engagemang offers a user-friendly and flexible solution that allows your customers to manage their cases directly through a personal portal. Here, users can view, track, and interact with their ongoing cases, which enhances both transparency and efficiency in the communication process." -- some kind of ticket/case management system for gov't agencies
https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/elektron... "With our secure end-to-end e-ID and eSign services, we can help you streamline document and contract management, gain access to all desired e-ID issuers, and improve cost efficiency." -- this sounds like a bad thing to compromise, but is to the best of my understanding a system for digital signatures on documents, and has no relation to BankID
https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/e-tjanst... "Gain better control over your organization’s representatives with our easy-to-use representative registry. By automating the identification and verification of representatives, you’ll gain a clear overview and enhance the security of your processes." -- sounds like some bullshit CRUD app for managing who can "represent" a gov't agency
https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/e-tjanst... "SHS is Sweden’s common standard for information exchange, enabling secure and efficient communication between government agencies, businesses, and organizations." -- this might be bad if real data was leaked
These are services used by various Swedish government agencies and it's pretty bad to have even a test instance of them hacked, but let's calm down. The entire Swedish state has not been compromised here.
OK, let me rephrase that: CGI, while they may "have something to do" with BankID in the sense that they have developed systems that integrate with it, does not itself develop BankID and does not hold any private keys for BankID.
What does "electronic signing documents" mean? Keys used for signing? Or merely some documents that were signed with electronic signing?
To the best of my understanding it means that a system made by CGI for digital signing of documents (as in: you get something like a PDF from a government agency and need to digitally sign it and send it back) has had its source code and/or some data belonging to it leaked.
Skatteverket, the Swedish tax authority, has been quoted in media as confirming that they use CGI's system for digital document signing but that none of their data nor that of any citizens has been leaked.
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/uppgift-statlig-it-inform...
"One of the government agencies that uses CGI’s services is the Swedish Tax Agency, which was notified of the incident by the company. However, according to the Swedish Tax Agency, its users have nothing to worry about.
“Neither our data nor our users’ data has been leaked. It is a service we use for e-signatures that has been affected, but there is no data from us or our users there,” says Peder Sjölander, IT Director at the Swedish Tax Agency."
So if no data was leaked from the tax agency or from the users, then the leaked "digital signing documents" must have belonged to the only remaining party, which is CGI, so perhaps they were just some marketing documents about the benefits of their digital signing service?
The original phrasing from the attacker, from the website that put the data up for download/sale, was ”documents (for electronic signing)” which implies that they’re documents that would be signed in said system. I would take all of this with a large helping of salt though. CGI claims it’s not real production data anyway; maybe it is and maybe it’s not.
The best case scenario is in line with what CGI claims: these are lorem ipsum fake docs from an old git repo for a test instance of the system.
If that is case, then it would have been wrong from the beginning for any government to keep hold of the private keys for the signature on my citizen card.
Because in that case they can sign documents on my behalf without my permission. In a court case, it would be near impossible for me to prove that the government gave my private key to someone else and that it wasn't me signing an incriminating document.
I apparently didn't phrase that very well. If what is the case? I was trying to ask which case was the case, not trying to claim that something specific was the case.
I'm familiar with electronic signatures, and I know what documents are, but I have never heard the phrase "electronic signing documents" and don't know what that is supposed to mean. What kind of documents? Documents about signing, documents that were signed, documents in the sense that files containing keys could be considered documents, or what?
In Portugal we were early adopters for digital signatures on citizen cards.
You use the card reader, insert your gov-issued identification and can sign PDF papers which have legal validity since the private key from the citizen card was used.
Now imagine someone signing random legal documents with your ID for things like debts, opening companies or subscritions to whatever.
We might've lucked out here, there is some signature data on ID cards today and official _plans_ to make a government backed signing service, but practically _nobody_ uses them in practice to just revoking all those keys will be a minor issue.
Currently most Swede's use a private bank consortisum controlled ID solution for most logins and signatures.
I am a Swedish citizen. Lived here for almost 40 years. It is a bit unclear to be what the "the Swedish e-government platform" is. Would have been great if they at least could have published which domain name the service has.
It's not going to be a specific service or agency with a domain name, it's going to be services that are either internal and used by employees only, or that are integrated into other systems that you may be interacting with without knowing it.
I would guess that skatteverket.se, polisen.se, kronofogden.se are among those affected by the leak.
Some other comments mention BankID private keys . That would be the biggest disaster as that’s what everyone uses to identify themselves “securely” on all government services.
The private keys in BankID are stored in users phones, not centrally.
That's an interesting guess that I assume is based on absolutely nothing?
Yes, nothing and the facts that these are government services, they use BankID and they updated their websites with "maintenance work" announcements for tomorrow, Saturday. For kronofogden.se there was no maintenance planned just half an hour ago. Knowing swedish tendency to plan things months ahead I would _guess_ that this maintenance work has been rushed due to some circumstances.
It's quite possible that the maintenance is related, but I can nearly 100% assure you this has absolutely nothing to do with BankID. I don't know who suggested that but they are either poorly informed or actively trying to sow FUD.
Nothing in particular, based on my understanding CGI a Swedish IT consultant company was hacked, they have contracts for and are the maintainers and developers of a bunch of various government departments IT services.
There is no such thing according to Peder Sjölander, IT Director at the Swedish Tax Agency:
https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/uppgift-statlig-it-inform...
– Neither our data nor our users' data has been leaked. It is a service we use for e-signatures that has been affected, but there is no data from us or our users there, says
The information that source code was leaked from a joint government e-platform is not true, according to Peder Sjölander.
– There is no such platform. I think the perpetrators in this want people to feel insecure. We feel confident that our data is safe and we have the situation under control before the tax return period opens next week.
Does anyone know if there is the source code for the Swedish Armed Forces - Team Test [1] in the leak? It was a really fun collaborative flash-style game that got popular in my circle of friends for some reason back then.
[1] https://flashism.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/swedish-armed-forc...
Maybe they should go open source from the start, then there's nothing to leak.
P.S.: And strangers will sometimes help you find vulnerabilities (and sometimes be very obnoxious but that's not open source's fault).
Yeah. In these cases it's not like anyone is going to spin up their own instance and start competing with you.
Government / handles society-critical things code should really be public unless there are _really_ good reasons for it not to be, where those reasons are never "we're just not very good at what we're doing and we don't want anyone to find out".
Anything taxpayer funded should be open source to begin with.
Similarly taxpayer funded contracts for any type of infrastructure (obviously I have digital infrastructure powered by proprietary solutions in mind) should only be awarded if interoperability is guaranteed to prevent lock-in and abuse.
I see comments about Swedish personal identification numbers. But the article is about source code that's leaked, not a database of numbers, right? I was thinking: should government source code not be open source anyway?
I like paper documents for this very reason.
It's very hard to steal everyone's documents when they weight about the same as a train.
But it’s also very easy to lose all of them in a fire or flood. Different tradeoffs.
> it’s easy to lose all of them in a fire or flood
Wouldn't a fire or flood affect everything? Both data stored on paper and hard disks?
The good news is you can keep offline, offsite digital copies, which is much more convenient than offsite paper copies.
I think what the comment meant was that it's harder for an individual to lose their paper documents compared to losing the electronic ones. It just shifts who's responsible for keeping them safe
This is a feature not a bug.
That depends entirely on what the records hold and who is interpreting the event.
Problems with well-known solutions 100 years ago:
"Fireproof file rooms and cabinets in the 1920s were crucial for protecting business and government records during the rapid expansion of the industrial era. The era saw a massive shift from flammable wooden office furniture to robust, steel-based storage designed to resist both fire and water damage."
That's a Google AI summary - but I've been in a fair number of buildings with such rooms. Thick concrete walls, heavy steel fire doors, no other openings, nothing but steel file cabinets in 'em, sealed electric light fixtures that look like they belong in a powder magazine (where one spark could kill everyone) - it's really simple tech.
And "high ground" was a reliable flood protection tech several centuries before that.
Then add “earthquake” to the list, or “domestic terrorists or foreign country bombing the building”. Steelman the argument. The point isn’t “just fire and water specifically”, we’re not playing Pokémon.
We have several historic examples of records being lost in disasters, and way more recent than 100 years ago.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Personnel_Records_Cen...
It makes no difference that we could’ve prevented that with better building construction. We didn’t, and hindsight does not bring the records back. We should plan for the world we want but cannot ignore the world we have.
I’m not defending digital as always better or criticising physical. Like I said, different tradeoffs, meaning there are advantages and disadvantages to both, there’s no solution which is better in all situations.
I stuck to the threats you mentioned. Paper in a file room is more slightly more quake-resistant and bomb-resistant than digital. But slower to move to safety if the threat is large volcanic eruptions.
I am not saying that paper is magically perfect. Nor better in every situation. I am saying that paper is far easier (than digital) to do well for use cases like a national records collection. "Correctly" may include off-site backups - whether or not your threat model includes massive earthquakes, volcanoes, bombs, special forces, EMP weapons, biological agents, civil war, radioactive fallout, or enemy occupation. Or "Management wouldn't pay for a done-right facility".
As I noted in another comment, the largest downside to paper (within such use cases), is that it is far more difficult to get political support for old-fashioned stuff that just works, compared to anything that can be sold as cool/new/high-tech. Especially when the taxpayer-funded revenue streams from selling/installing/supporting the tech create incentives clearly contrary to the taxpaper's long-term interests.
No politician ever got elected by supporting simple, old-fashioned stuff that just worked.
This keeps happening in Europe with these mega-IT suppliers repeatedly getting exposed using very bad development practices. Sweden most recently had a major breach back in 2024 when the other large IT services supplier TietoEvry had their data centres breached and claimed "not actually an issue of security".
Several government organisations / regional authorities and companies were down. Last I heard several medical journals for whole municipalities were just destroyed.
Unfortunately, the public tender process encourages awarding contracts to these giants that repeatedly fail to deliver on even basic opsec and still believe in security-by-obscurity, are suspicious of things like zero-trust, follow outdated engineering practices. Sigh.
> Unfortunately, the public tender process encourages awarding contracts to these giants that repeatedly fail to deliver on even basic opsec and still believe in security-by-obscurity
So what you think would be the solution ? From what I see (both public tender or not), I would claim that "any large IT project/company will suffer from security issues", so not sure what is the added value to single out a process (the tender) or a region (Europe) if there is no obvious alternative.
I have (the start of a) solution, but it's a boring one:
You have to have people who care about this stuff.
If you don't care, the rest does not matter. It does not matter if, when and how you outsource if you don't care about the outcome. You can't just pay someone a salary, nor a consulting bill, check the box and say you've done your part.
And the other way around: These huge consulting conglomerates would get very few jobs if purchasers cared about the details, and not just that all the boxes are checked.
I don't think that's a particularly novel idea, the question is how do you get people who care in an organization that has hundreds of thousands of employees (the public sector)?
You may not like the trivial answer: The same way as we do everything else. How do we get people to show up for work? How do we get people to respect data security boundaries? None of these are questions of technology. The answer is culture. We need to create a strong shared culture of caring, by hiring people that care and putting them in an environment where caring is appreciated.
> You have to have people who care about this stuff.
What?! Preposterous! How could you even make money out of that? No no no, that will not do. You will ask your AI agent some vague question, commit the result without review and push it to the client. And you’ll like it. If there’s any trouble, call Timothy, he’ll be on vacation with his family in Thailand. Some resort, “Lotus” something or other.
Germany has iirc liability for the entire chain (engineers to upper management) in case of data breaches. I remember having to sign for that when I did a project in Germany. Would that help? I would not mind if the CEO/CTO of Odido would spend a couple of years in a federal pound them in the ass prison if it is found out the leak was due to malpractice.
The tender process is what they are optimised for. They are professional project bidders with a bit of outsourced software development bolted on the back.
A lot of outsourced development.
The tender process + clueless buyers + tender process law(s) cause this. Whole process needs a revamp for this to not be a problem.
Knowing swedish people's mindset I'm not surprised at all by the breach. What can be mildly surprising is that no major e-gov service has expressed concerns on their websites. Only on skatteverket.se, which is Swedish Tax Service website, there is a vague note on "maintenance work" planned for coming Saturday. Maybe totally unrelated though.
Interesting, care to elaborate?
e-government services should be open-sources by default!
Now there is an additional reason for that.
Public money, public code.
Anyone knows what their tech stack looks like?
Unless they hardcode passwords and other juicy details in their source code what's all the fuzz about? It is a publicly funded thingy anyways.
What forum is the original screenshot from? It reminds me of cs.rin.ru
As long as cronyism remains the primary qualification for leadership, nothing will ever change, worse, it's only going to get worse
Accountability now, send these people to prison
How much GDPR fine will they pay? Oh wait it's gov so nothing / does no matter even if.
Who will take responsibility and get fired and lose all pension etc.? Oh wait no one.
Well the citizens need to suck it up.
Few years ago a huge NRA database was left public with admin/1234 or similar by the Bulgarian NRA. They government fined itself some non-trivial amount, then in the source/destination IBAN they put the same value and paid the fine. They managed to find someone to blame and it was not the person who left the database but the person who found it. Turns out that if you leave the PII of a whole country open to the public it is not your fault and you get to keep your cozy job. It is already unlawful to access that, so if someone access it - it is his fault - he broke the law.
Edit, i checked the facts: The Bulgarian government said that the it should pay too much to itself, and appealed the fine for few years until it somehow expired. And the guy (20 year at that time) they accused was later acquitted after they tried to ruin his life.
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As the attack actor now has the data, they're liable for ongoing GDPR failures, on top of the theft. Then anyone they sell the data to becomes liable (on top of handling stolen goods). Could be a money-earner for the EU if they pursue it properly.
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Is this the open source stuff everyone is talking about?
I think this is good to highlight for non-Scandinavians.
Scandinavian countries are extremely open and transparent in a way that might be shocking for Americans. For example, in Norway, I can check nearly anyone's brokerage account holdings, addresses, phone numbers, etc. on public websites. I can in theory look up anyone's tax filings.
Personal identification numbers do not tend to be considered private in the same way that social security numbers in the US are.
We're so open, we even leak our government source code _ourselves_ https://github.com/navikt
I heard a rumor that some people use this to check their neighbour's revenue and sometimes make snark comments if one of them has a high revenue but lives in a "average revenue" part of town.
They'd say that if you earn a lot, you shouldn't take a cheap housing.
Any truth to that?
There used to be a lot more of that, but a system was put in place where you have to identify yourself with electronic ID to access the information, and the information is logged so the other party can see it.
Nowadays I think mostly journalists use it to pull up information about politicians and other people that are in the public spotlight. There are of course the yearly "richest people in Norway" lists in various categories.
Making snark comments about that sounds very unlikely. More likely they'd have respect for someone living frugally and not showing off. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
Yes and no. You get notified if someone else actually asks for your revenue info and so in practice nobody actually does it.
There's paid services that pull it for you, most charging around 100nok (10eur) per lookup.[1]
Media is also allowed to pull "top" lists like the 100 people with the most income in a city, 100 people with the most wealth in a city, etc.
[1] https://sjekkskatt.no/
Yep, that tracks.
There's also the underlying current of Jantelagen (Law of Jante) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante
How do they have handle identity thefts, spams, etc.?
There are so many ways to misuse these data. Are the residents not concerned about this?
The root cause of identity theft in USA and some other places is the lack of "proper" national identity and the associated use of various personal "secrets" (not that secret) for identity verification because there are no good easy other ways.
Businesses in Scandinavia and many other countries would not treat someone knowing your personal information as any evidence of identity (because it's not); having all that information is not sufficient to impersonate you there - identity theft does happen but it would require stealing or forging physical documents or actual credentials to things like bank accounts; knowing all of what your mother or spouse would know is not enough to e.g. get credit or get valuable goods in your name.
> How do they handle identity thefts
By just accepting it as a normal fact of life that you will have some random stuff ordered in your name sooner or later with an invoice you'll have to dispute. Happened to a relative of mine, police do not care unless they order things above a certain value, without a police report you cannot get free ID protection, and then you'll have to sit for a long time in phone queues trying to cancel a subscription for a streaming service or whatever they ordered while get thrown around by support reps who go "you SURE you or someone in your family didn't order this?"
It's just a unique ID of a person, it's not a password. I don't see how you can be confused by this.
It's also "anyone's brokerage account holdings, addresses, phone numbers" according to the comment that this subthread of the conversation is about.
And then there are widespread amounts of identity theft and mapping out of minorities, but you may sleep well as everyone knowing where you do so is an important step in making sure corruption is no more, don't think too much about it.
Just a few years ago this was about to change in Sweden.
But they didn't change it, because "women should be able to look up the men that they date".
Oh yes. I'm Swedish and I do have to admit I have looked up quite a lot of people on these kinds of sites. It's become so normalised to do this even though I also feel like it would be better as a whole if they just did not exist in the first place.
Last update I heard about something being done about it was this:
https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2024/11/utredning...
Not sure what the current status is.
Not open but stupid, IMHO.
Identification numbers per se are not particularly useful or hard to get, they are effectively public information
They are absolutely trivial to get. One click on mrkoll.se.
> by simply signing an agreement with SPAR
But that seems like a completely different thing than a nefarious and anonymous person or group having access to the entire database.
Yeah, nefarious or anonymous people have never used the internet so they could never find out that this was all public information.
public information if they signed an agreement with the Swedish government?
You can get all of that one-by-one? Or can you get the whole database at once?