This is why we need age verification in the EU, so hackers don't need to attack individual countries.

But at least the children will feel safe.

For those who are not familiar with the Danish citizen register: Basically it's an ancient system made way before computers were a thing and it's just not been updated to modern standards because politicians never prioritize things before they blow up in their face.

The crux of the issue: In Denmark, your personal ID is not just an ID, it is also an access token. So you need to keep your ID number secret, otherwise others can use it to look up your personal information. Like, imagine your username was also your password, that's how dumb this system is. Add to this the fact that certain private companies get priveliged access to the citizen register for reasons and anyone with a few braincells could predict this happening 20 years ago.

People need to understand how f*king bad this is.

Cybersecurity isn't taken seriously enough especially by the public sector. Most fraud aren't done the old school way of physical heist, it's done online now. AI and quantum computers will only make it worse.

That said, as much as people rightfully hate AI, there is a point that slowing down AI could be a matter of national security. For all we know, it could be a state actor involved in the hacking of the Danish registry. We must slow down the development of AI, but undemocratic bad faith actors who don't care about public opinion won't slow it down.

We dont have to worry about a similar thing happening in sweden cause our system is fucked up and everybody already has access to every registered(not even just citizens) persons name, address, phone number, etc.

In a country of 6 million people, getting 8.8 million CPR numbers is impressive.

Sounds like they went in through the front door. Great security there. At least one of Denmark’s neighbours provides similar access to companies.

Having used the system some time ago, I'm not too worried. It only shows the name and latest address. Basically like the white pages but with a soc.sec.ID instead of the phone number.

It lacks info on a lot of people, because some people aren't too good at reporting when they move, and some are hidden for legal reasons.

The most dangerous thing would be if the data is sold to stalkers, because it does have more addresses than the white pages.

The soc.sec.no. includes birthday and gender, so it can also be used for targeting scams.

Anyway, it's not like this data wasn't already available in one way or another. The breach just made it easier for whoever did it.

And this is exactly why saving all data about every citizen, including bank transfers and patient records in a single data base is a risk not worth taking. It‘s a terrible idea and simply proposing it already shows you don‘t know anything about keeping data and the people attached to it safe. Everyone knew this would happen. Painful incompetence on so many levels. And so very avoidable if you just didn‘t save it all in one place, under the same user IDs. A surveillance state comes at a terrible cost no matter who the government is at the time. It‘s a bad system.

I wonder how long they can keep the hacked company's name undisclosed

Wherever there is a feeding trough, the swine will come.

And a centralised registry of the entire population is a gargantuan feeding trough for data hungry digital swine.