Dutch Hacker Obtained Virtually All Austrians' Personal Data, Police Say

A Dutch hacker arrested in November obtained and offered for sale the full name, address and date of birth of virtually everyone in Austria, the Alpine nation's police said on Wednesday. From a report: A user believed to be the hacker offered the data for sale in an online forum in May 2020, presenting it as "the full name, gender, complete address and date of birth of presumably every citizen" in Austria, police said in a statement, adding that investigators had confirmed its authenticity.

The trove comprised close to nine million sets of data, police said. Austria's population is roughly 9.1 million. The hacker had also put "similar data sets" from Italy, the Netherlands and Colombia up for sale, Austrian police said, adding that they did not have further details.

I kinda like it

[peterww]

Honestly, maybe we should have surveillance everywhere, and then make all the surveillance public. So everybody knows what everybody is doing all the time. Fewer people would do all the stupid shit they do, because they'd know everybody would know about it immediately. So leaking personal information wouldn't be as bad, because you would find out who used your personal information immediately and go break their legs, so they wouldn't abuse it.

Just a reminder

[CEC-P]

For anyone left in the IT world that doesn't think all biometrics should be banned, remember that it's easy to change a password. It's moderately difficult to impossible to change a government ID or tax number. It's impossible to change your fingerprint or iris or DNA. So since everyone everywhere is running some out of date, low effort IT system run my moronic low ball contractors and this keeps happening because of it, MAYBE biometric credentials should be banned from use everywhere.

Re:

[John Smith 2294]

I can change my fingerprint or iris without too much difficulty (though possibly lots of pain), DNA is trickier.

The actual question is

[Opportunist]

Why the hell did a record collection like that exist in the first place?

Re:

[John Smith 2294]

Census?

Re:

[Generic User Account]

Actually it's for the TV license. If you have a TV in Austria, you have to pay the GIS, similar to the way the BBC is financed in the UK.

Re:

[Slayer]

Actually it's for the TV license. If you have a TV in Austria, you have to pay the GIS, similar to the way the BBC is financed in the UK.

Correct. The agency is supposed to see, where people live, establish metrics of the "how many people live there and how many pay for TV licenses" in order to focus their license payment enforcement teams on areas with a high likely rate of tv viewers without a license. Or whatever.

What they were not supposed to do, was to assign this task to an incompetent sub contractor, who:

• - Feeds a test system with real data.

• - Hooks that test system to the internet.

• - Doesn't put in any effort to protect that test system

Re:

[AmiMoJo]

I wonder what take-up in Austria is like. In the UK I'm seeing quite a few people, especially younger ones, not bother with a TV licence at all. They just use streaming services instead.

The TV Licencing company tries to scare and bully them into buying one, but the cost isn't trivial for a lot of younger folk.

Re:

[thegarbz]

Why the hell did a record collection like that exist in the first place?

Because most developed governments in the world know where their people live. Even privacy conscious countries like Germany do that. A better question is why are you naïve enough to think that you aren't on a similar such database in your country.

Re:

[Opportunist]

I certainly am.

I just am not there.

Re:

[LordHighExecutioner]

In most countries, if you are a registered professional (engineer, physician, chemist, ...) your name, birth date, and address are available to the public.

Re:

[Opportunist]

I'd guess that would be a far cry from the "virtually all" that were exposed here.

Re:

[sabbede]

How can there be a GDPR violation for what is traditionally public information? Are Austria's birth records not public? Are there no public lists of people's addresses? Seems to me that they wouldn't need to hack anything to get this information, they'd just have to dump public information into a spreadsheet.

Netherlands, Brazil, Romania...

[John Smith 2294]

Netherlands, Brazil, Romania, Russia, Nigera, China, Switzerland. Lets just all block them all. They encourage their citizens to participate in international criminal schemes. Lawless countries have no place on the internet.

Pretty much all of my new client sites are now only visible to the US, Canada, UK, Ireland and Germany. The rest of the world might as well not exist.

I guess it is an OK short term strategy (e.g. the Swiss actively protecting and encouraging international extortionists), and can make the

Public information already

[dv82]

... isn't it?

Re:

[sabbede]

Yeah, except for birthdays that's all information you'd find in a phone book. If those still exist that is.