24
votes
Danish government confirms its Central Person Register was hacked – data breach affects eight million citizens and includes names, addresses, and social security numbers
Link information
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- Title
- Hackers steal 8 million citizens' records from Danish government database | TechCrunch
- Authors
- Zack Whittaker
- Published
- Oct 5 2026
- Word count
- 231 words
I consider my social security number (CPR) to be practically public by now. This is just one more big breach among several, though it does seem to be the biggest. Some years ago the motor register was breached, so basically everyone with a drivers license. This seems to cover almost everyone, as the breach is larger than the living population of Denmark - as it also includes deceased people.
We should really stop using this number as both an identifier and a password at the same time. To be fair, you can do a lot less with the number alone than before. But it certainly doesn’t help as now attackers have more information to make even more precise phishing attacks and identity thefts.
Least surprising news ever, our country's tech systems are hilariously bad lol
Makes me wonder if this is why I got a scam call the other day and he didn't even say hi or hello, just instantly said "Smoontjes! Smoontjes?" in English in a very thick accent. Never hung up and blocked a number so fast in my life
I honestly don't think our IT systems are as such much worse than in other countries, but Denmark is one of the most heavily digitalized countries, so there are more systems and integrations where things can go wrong. Haven't gotten any uptick in scams, but everyone should definitely be more aware for weird things now.
To a degree that was both startling and disconcerting when I studied in Aarhus as an Australian ten years ago.
It is digitised but it goes far beyond that and it's more centralised and authority run than the tech of the day can describe; I got the impression society has operated this way since the records were on card file. At this point it's the default culture - people expect to be assigned a doctor and not choose one, as a random example. That's not digitisation, it's much more fundamental.
It means Denmark is awesome for anyone wanting to run, say, a medical study as it has incredibly deep records and people are entirely used to them not being private. It also means that data breaches have the potential to be more serious than in many places, something that was only true in the card file era with physical access.
Did they say your username or your real name? I can't decide if the username would be more hilarious or terrifying.
One of the reasons I seriously oppose our push for more digitalisation, mass-surveillance and data harvesting.
Many organisations are notoriously fucking bad with data security, especially government-owned ones founded by lawmakers who have hardly any grasp on how technology works themselves.
At this point I think it's going to take a cataclysmic and highly destructive data breach until we finally begin to slam the brakes.