Skip to main content

Glitch in Tax Service Exposed 1.2 Million Danes' CPR Numbers



A bug in the TastSelv Borger tax service which falls under the management of the US company DXC Technology has exposed almost 1.2 million CPR numbers of Danish citizens to the American multinational companies – Google and Adobe. The leak has been discovered by The Danish Agency for Development and Simplification for the first time, however, the researchers claim that CPR numbers along with other sensitive information have been exposed for around 5 years now.

  People who have a tax liability to Denmark are allowed by TastSelv's services to see and alter their tax returns, annual statements and pay residual tax. As per the findings of the security researchers at the agency, all the exposed data was found to be encrypted and hence reportedly, Google and Adobe were not able to view the same due to encryption which barred them.

Other sources have it that in an attempt to downplay the entire incident, The Danish Agency for Development and Simplification put forth a solid confirmation on the CPR numbers being encrypted when accessed by the companies. Meanwhile, cybersecurity specialist and founder of the CSIS group, Peter Kruse asserted that Google did access those 1.2 million CPR numbers as there was no encryption, according to him the numbers were rather in plain text.

How was the glitch exploited?

It was when the users who were logged into TastSelv Borger happened to click on the text displayed as 'Correct contact information' and consequently rectified the contact information, faced an error in the app. The error triggered the process of transferring the CPR numbers to Google and Adobe, as per DR news website.

Referencing from the statement given by the government agency, “We take this kind of case very seriously. And of course, we need to be able to make sure that our suppliers handle all data according to applicable law and within the framework agreed upon with them.”

“The data received by Google is unencrypted. Google has been able to read data in unencrypted form,” he added.

“Google Hosted Libraries have been designed to remove all information that allows identifying users before logging on. Thus, no user information is shared with Google in this process.” Google told the website which first reported the incident.


source https://www.ehackingnews.com/2020/02/glitch-in-tax-service-exposed-12.html
Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Betting and Gambling Websites under Cyberattack from Chinese Hackers

Since last year's summers, Chinese hackers have been targeting South Asian companies that own online gambling and betting websites. The gambling companies in South Asia have confirmed the hacks, whereas rumors of cyberattacks on betting websites have also emerged from Europe, and the Middle East, however, the rumors are yet to confirm, says the reports of cybersecurity group Trend Micro and Talent-Jump. Cybersecurity experts claim that no money was stolen in these hacks against the gambling websites. However, hackers have stolen source codes and databases. The motive of the attack was not a cybercrime, but rather espionage intended attack to gain intelligence. According to the experts, a group named ' DRBControl ' is responsible for the cyberattack. According to the reports of Trend Micro, the hacking techniques used in this particular cyberattack incident is similar to methods done by Emissary Panda and Winnti. All of these hacking groups are from China that has launc...
5 comments
Read more

Provider Volia reported to the cyber police about the intense cyberattacks on the server

Cable provider Volia appealed to the Cyber Police on the fact of fixing a DDoS attack on the Kharkov servers of the company, which has been ongoing since May 31. "For three days, from May 31 to today, the Volia infrastructure in Kharkov is subjected to cyberattacks. At first, they were carried out only on subscriber subsystems, later they switched to telecommunications infrastructure. As a result, more than 100,000 subscribers experienced problems using the Internet, IPTV, multi-screen platform, and digital TV," said the company. In total, the complete lack of access to Volia's services, according to the provider, lasted 12 minutes on May 31, 45 minutes on June 1. There was also an attack on the website volia.com, but it was managed to neutralize. "DDoS attacks were massive and well-organized. The type of attack is UDP flood and channel capacity overflow with the traffic of more than 200 GB. UDP is a protocol used for online streaming services - streaming, te...
Post a Comment
Read more

Github Escapes from Octopus Malware that Affected its 26 Software Projects

Github, a platform where every malicious software report is equally different in its place, manages to escape from a malware threat.  Github, an organization that united the world's largest community of coders and software developers, revealed that hackers exploited an open-source platform on its website to distribute malware. The hackers used a unique hacking tool that enabled backdoors in each software project, which the hackers used to infiltrate the software systems. "While we have seen many cases where the software supply chain was compromised by hijacking developer credentials or typosquatting popular package names, a malware that abuses the build process and its resulting artifacts to spread is both interesting and concerning for multiple reasons," said Github on its security blog. Fortunately, the hackers attempt to exploit the open-source platform was unsuccessful. Still, if it were, on the contrary, hackers could've secured a position in the softwares, ...
Post a Comment
Read more