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.
Afaik this breach also contained a lot of data about medical condition related to workplaces.
If I understand correctly the only thing not public that was leaked was the role each person had in the government.
Why would the role within the government not be public? I can't imagine that being treated as a secret.
Europe is not one country. It’s like seeing Tornados in Kansas and assuming that is all of US
Sweden*
Non of this is public in Germany or Netherlands
Yet another sign that governments and corporations should support SECURE programming language development and treat it like other (critical) infrastructure.
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.
You'll have to pay for that if you're going to have people as motivated as the adversaries.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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.
Was the leak due to a stack overflow, double free or similar issue?
It was an outsourcing overflow. /s
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.
PHP was developed 30 years ago.