`123456' password used in Danish CPR data breach (cphpost.dk)

368 pointsby baal80spam12 hours ago190 comments

ionwake 11 hours ago

Im sorry I know Im getting old but I say everyone is responsible. From the press who might focus too much on the whistleblower, to the poeple who OKed the company for 3rd party access, to the team responsible for regulation to the person who didnt order further checks.

I dont understand why there is not massive reorganisations in systems when things go wrong. Its always , oh yeah so we fired the guy furthest down the ladder.

You might think Im being weird, but after living many years in corporate the amount of times you see some major thing go wrong and some random guy get fired for it - often the dude who found/highlighted the problem, is crazy. I mean you simply don't believe it until you witness it. Its just moral/leadership decay.

I wouldn't have made this comment but I see comments with people empathising with certain individuals in cases like this, when the way to be nice is to overhaul the system of checks and people responsible and spread the blame, fixing the domain.

bombcar 11 hours ago

There's a very "child-like" (not in a good way) form of responsibility that everyone seems to lean into as they climb up - very intent-based.

I asked them to do a thing, but didn't intend the obvious consequences* so it's not my fault they occurred.

ben_w 10 hours ago

> I asked them to do a thing, but didn't intend the obvious consequences* so it's not my fault they occurred.

And now we have the same thing but the bosses 'hire' AI.

Now I realise this is part of how unusual my thinking is.

I'm happy to use phrases like "ChatGPT hacked out of the sandbox, then hacked into HuggingFace"; people often respond to this like I'm suggesting OpenAI isn't at fault, and like, that's not my position at all, so far as I'm concerned the buck still stops with the person who set the task regardless, the thing that changes from incidents like this is now nobody in the future gets to even have the excuse "oh but we didn't know it could even do that" or "we didn't know it might interpret our orders in that kind of way".

The response, both when a human messes up and now when an AI messes up, needs to be defence in depth: someone giving orders needs to be giving clear orders, entities (human or machine) who follow instructions need to have not just an understanding of how to follow them, but also what's so out of scope as to be forbidden - the difference between 'follow orders' and 'follow lawful orders'.

soco 10 hours ago

You have a very engineer-like approach, like if you draw the line from A to B everything will work fine. Real world is different though. Humans will blissfully ignore the orders, business analysis is a lost cause since decades, and AI is built on human knowledge so guess what it will keep doing. Now what? How do we build systems without assuming complete adherence, but tolerating imperfection and failures? Isn't there some discipline teaching us that?

ben_w 10 hours ago

I indeed have a engineer-like approach, but engineering absolutely does not assume draw line from A to B and expect that's enough:

Real world, as you say, not so simple. Everything has to deal with certain degree of forecastable nonsense, e.g. a bridge has to cope not only with traffic and winds, but the possibility that someone will be drunk in charge of a ship and crash into it.

> AI is built on human knowledge so guess what it will keep doing.

Yes, and also brings its own additional mess on top of that. All machine learning takes a huge number of examples to get good, so an LLM isn't just "read all the online courses in how to run a business", but also likely has 50 business versions of the recent demonstration of common sense failure with "I live 100m from a car wash, should I walk or drive?"

> How do we build systems without assuming complete adherence, but tolerating imperfection and failures? Isn't there some discipline teaching us that?

Many such disciplines. Perhaps all except maths and computer science? Or even including maths and computer science, given stats is part of maths and even compsci has to deal with fault tolerance.

christophilus 9 hours ago

> Isn't there some discipline teaching us that?

That’d be engineering.

randysalami 8 hours ago

Yes and there is a reason, we are in theory, held to such higher standards. I used to think it was harder to draw the line with AI. The simple reason being when I as an engineer say something is not feasible (not not possible, just wrong and not worth doing), I could be overridden with AI. Now that we have more complex models == more money, I can draw the line with dollars and that is a language way stronger than technical feasibility to management.

tokai 10 hours ago

Yeah that is a pretty weird opinion. Who cares about if he gets fired. He should be charged with criminal negligence and face prison time. Everyone is responsible for their own actions and its always possible to quit.

zweifuss 10 hours ago

The account with the weak password was a former employee. It’s not on her/him that the account remained active and the admin password wasn't changed in the same process.

miohtama 10 hours ago

Massive reorganisation will only happen if companies with poor security record go out of business, while competent ones win market share.

Otherwise shareholders do not care, because they do not have skin in the game.

Same for government staff. Unless they are explicitly fired there are no consequences of abusing the trust of public.

chrisjj 9 hours ago

> Massive reorganisation will only happen if companies with poor security record go out of business, while competent ones win market share.

... said every "security" pedlar ever.

asdf88990 10 hours ago

Rome wasn’t built in a day, not did it fall in a day. In a capitalist society you can gauge overall direction and success of the society but how well the market and private enterprise is doing, and well not merely in context of maximising shareholder value but as a fundamental part of the social fabric.

saghm 9 hours ago

I've tried reading your second sentence several times but I'm unable to parse it. What exactly are you trying to say?

asdf88990 2 hours ago

By* how well

lukan 9 hours ago

"I dont understand why there is not massive reorganisations in systems when things go wrong"

Because massive reorganisations can easily lead to even more things going wrong. Also most people are lazy and phlegmatic by default.

coliveira 9 hours ago

A major problem we have is that computer programming is not engineering as people like to say. An engineering discipline VALUES redundancy and is always designing for safety. Programming likes to think of itself as math, and deliberately choses less redundancy for the sake of convenience and speed. The classical example is how operating systems are written with languages that allow an index to be out of bounds. We now have systems that are glued together using bubble gum pretending to be safe, when they fail in the most horrible way when one of the links break.

chrisjj 9 hours ago

> I dont understand why there is not massive reorganisations in systems

This would just replace one insecure system with another.

It is time to recognise there's no such thing as a secure connected computer. And thanks to "AI" there's no such thing even as a significant defence lead over attackers.

al_borland 9 hours ago

They way I see it, there needs to be enough slack in an organization and the timelines for major products for people to not do the bare minimum. When management pushes goal X, and pushes hard, everything else starts to decay, including security. People need enough time to do the things they know they should do, but don’t feel they have the time for. At least this is where I’ve seen a lot of issues arise.

jamescontrol 8 hours ago

Yes I completely agree. In the local news there was focus on which company it was and that the password was 123456.

Of all the things that failed for that leak, we should focus the LEAST on the password being insecure, and the company whom had their account misused, and the most at the other end of the long line of failures.

Why was there no monitoring on a company suddenly looking up 600 people a minute, why was this only discovered when they were making the invoice?? And how was it even possible to have a password that unsafe, no two factor auth etc etc etc.

mschuster91 8 hours ago

The older the system, the higher the chance it never got a proper security audit, and/or it was built with a lot of implied trust, like most old Internet standards are.

As for 2FA, it is a nice thing to have, but it comes at a significant support cost. People lose their token, people get annoyed by the friction, people can't figure out setup (especially older folks).

_bernd 8 hours ago

That's not how auditing works as I have observed it. Either your stuff is critical, or not. And when it is then everything which touches data sees an audit and no password policy incl. Shared and weak credentials is the first thing that would have been spotted. I would assume they buried some stuff to deep in a hierarchy and 3rd service partners that this company in the end got no proper audit.

edoceo 6 hours ago

Oh no! Cost! Friction! Better just half-ass it then.

mschuster91 2 hours ago

We're talking about a country with 6 million inhabitants, of which a large number is old and/or barely computer-literate and/or barely actually literate. Or doesn't possess a smartphone at all and only uses government services from a public computer in a library.

Government services have to work in all these scenarios, simply because that is a right of the citizens.

Betelbuddy 8 hours ago

The security audit recommended changing the password to 234567, but management rejected it because it would require retraining staff

fierycatnet 8 hours ago

Im not in tech but still in corporate. Our store went through 6 GMs in 5 years. The problem is actually the corporate, not the new guy every 8 months who is being brought on to save the day. I think they're going to replace him again next year without addressing any of the issues on the ground.

basilgohar 7 hours ago

The incompetence will continue as long as people can profit from it inconsequentially.

Our system now heavily reenforces lack of accountability to executives for what happens under their watch.

Investors don't lose money when these breaches happen.

This is why it won't change until those change.

SoftTalker 6 hours ago

Let's also include the system itself, that allowed the account to have a password that short and apparently didn't require 2FA.

darepublic 5 hours ago

When you have bad practice and process it can erode the security discipline of everyone working within the system. Until they commit brazen crap like reusing simple passwords everywhere.

Tarq0n an hour ago

In a country like Denmark it's very common for a higher up to resign over something like this.

a34729t 41 minutes ago

sepuku would be more appropriate

TacticalCoder an hour ago

> I mean you simply don't believe it until you witness it. Its just moral/leadership decay.

I think there's also a big part of the line that Jennifer Lawrence says in the satiric comedy "Don't look up":

"They are not even smart enough to be as evil as you're giving them credit for."

Just as the person who picks 123456 as a password doesn't see where the problem is, I think there are really quite a lot of people dumb enough all along the decision chain to think that firing the person who reported the problem did actually fix the problem.

They are really that dumb.

andrew_mason1 11 minutes ago

i find it is usually most useful to blame systems, not people. of course, it is usually _easiest_ to blame a person, rather than go through the hard work of redesigning the system. hence why:

> I dont understand why there is not massive reorganisations in systems when things go wrong. Its always , oh yeah so we fired the guy furthest down the ladder.

zkmon 11 hours ago

I wouldn't the blame the guy. The security teams tend to serve entirely security related goals only, and they don't hesitate to stop all activity, if they are allowed to, to ensure the highest level of security. On the other side, there are people who have goals for productivity and getting work done. They don't hesitate to take the shortest route possible to maximize their productivity. If productivity is not your goal, then security is not my goal.

It's tussle between two counter-acting forces at play. This get's worse when the overarching authority that supervises both departments, has no clue about how to hit a balanced prioritization. For example, security teams rule the financial companies, like mafia bosses. No one, including CEO, can dare to question why so many layer of security is needed.

ano-ther 11 hours ago

With two people in the company, there is not a lot of room for corporate games though.

> According to Denmark’s Central Business Register, Pays ApS had two employees as of July 2026.

tialaramex 11 hours ago

> It's tussle between two counter-acting forces at play.

It really doesn't have to be, and setting things up as adversarial is counter-productive. Pretending that you're "balancing" two competing alternatives when they may not even be opposed is a problem, it gets you C++ std::span, a type which was standardized to be pointlessly dangerous because hey, surely if it's less safe that will make it faster right? [Morgan Freeman's Voice: But it was not faster]

tossandthrow 11 hours ago

I would love to hear about a world where security and productivity are not counter acting forces.

For a start, most people would certainly be more productive if they hadn't had to authenticate themselves.

If you can just create a world for that simple case, then I will rest my case.

tialaramex 10 hours ago

Single-sign on is actually a really obvious and familiar example where you achieved better security (now all sixty five systems we use are protected by the same security, when we upgrade that security we're upgrading all sixty five systems) and yet you got better productivity because now I can get stuff done without battling two dozen authentication systems to do it, just sign in once.

Another easy thing (unless they did it already and I didn't notice) would be Microsoft Entra could default enable Security Keys for authentication. Less friction than remembering passwords or one of those apps on your Phone, but better security.

chrisjj 9 hours ago

> Single-sign on is actually a really obvious and familiar example where you achieved better security

My local all-eggs basket vendor agrees 100%.

Dylan16807 3 hours ago

All the eggs keep being stored in the same place (same computer) either way, but one gives them a deluxe padded package and the other one wraps a random material around each egg.

chrisjj an hour ago

Because deluxe padding only comes in multi-egg size, I guess.

Dylan16807 an hour ago

Deluxe padding is a very high quality password and/or a physical device.

You're not convincing a normal person to memorize 20 high quality passwords, and multiple physical devices are going to be put on the same keyring.

So in short, yes.

tossandthrow 5 hours ago

Arguably, you'd still have better productivity had you not have to sign-in.

So you are still making a trade-off

xoa 5 hours ago

>Arguably, you'd still have better productivity had you not have to sign-in.

No, that is not arguable for anyone who takes more than a few seconds to think about it. Signing in has nothing to do with authentication, it's about things like "I want to have my own preferences set for showdead/noprocrast/etc. I want to maintain my own lists of favorites." Authentication & security are about making sure others don't access/alter your account or use your property or the like without permission, not about there being infinite resources and everyone being perfectly identical.

>So you are still making a trade-off

Nope.

xoa 9 hours ago

>I would love to hear about a world where security and productivity are not counter acting forces.

Well, it's this one? Or at least for a wide array of practices. To take a trivial example, can you explain how switching encryption from DES to AES (a clear improvement to security) is counteractive to productivity? Of course not, whether it's AES or ChaCha20-Poly1305 or ROT13 the choice of underlying cipher is transparent to the higher level user/application. Or how about reducing memory overflow bugs? That improves security, while also reducing a certain class of crashes. How is reducing software crashes counteractive to productivity?

Even if we take your silly example you clearly intend as a gotcha:

>For a start, most people would certainly be more productive if they hadn't had to authenticate themselves.

People have to identify themselves though in a multi-user environment anyway. Even completely putting aside any sort of security, we all of course have our own preferences for work environment, our own collections of data, etc etc etc. Duh. When we access a system (be it via GUI or CLI or web site) we need to say "I want to use xyz account" anyway. So the marginal cost to auth well can be zero. Using a password manager means "entering user name" and "entering user name and password at the same time" both have the exact same cost: 1 click of a button. Or if using a smartcard/USB PIV token or the like instead, it again can be the same effort: insert it, tap something.

Certainly it's true that sometimes there are unavoidable tradeoffs. But there's a lot of low hanging fruit where things can be made more convenient/productive and more secure at the same time.

tossandthrow 7 hours ago

You are paltering.

The premise was not to enhance security, but to design a world where security and productivity are not tradeoffs.

xoa 5 hours ago

>You are paltering.

No, I'm honestly engaging with the topic and your post, vs tossing around insults.

>The premise was not to enhance security, but to design a world where security and productivity are not tradeoffs.

And I gave you examples, including engaging with your own example/question. You claimed that "most people would certainly be more productive if they hadn't had to authenticate themselves". But IDing and authenticating are different operations, people would need to ID regardless even in a world where no security was necessary. So if the marginal cost of auth over ID is zero, then by definition that means there is no tradeoff between security and productivity. Something like a security key/card is an example of accomplishing that. Plugging that in and typing 6 numbers or touching it is not merely no extra effort vs typing my user name alone, it's literally faster.

And again to other examples, anything transparent to the user is, again, by definition not an impact on productivity. For another not merely "common" but "near universal" example, see full disk encryption (which is now often the default even with no authentication at all). FDE definitely addresses a few classes of threat scenario. What do you argue is the tradeoff in productivity?

chrisjj 9 hours ago

> most people would certainly be more productive if they hadn't had to authenticate themselves.

... right up to the moment when they aren't.

I like to think of a law of conservation of productivity.

Before: yours 100%, hacker's 0%.

After: yours 0%, hacker's 100%.

Nonsense, of course. Hacker's boost is nearer 100,000%.

Fact is, modern computer power is inherently far more productive for bad than good. And the economic incentive follows.

tossandthrow 7 hours ago

Ah yes, you found the perfect argument to give sec people full and uncontrolled reign.

Not is it probable that people will take over our system. But is it possible.

ulfbert_inc 11 hours ago

You are presenting a false dilemma (probably unintentionally). While security can be at odds with usability, basic measures like password generation and management are a solved problem. In fact using password manager is more convenient than typing password manually, even 123456 :)

xandrius 11 hours ago

Ha, I don't need to type 123456, it's stored in my navigator's password manager for convenience. Checkmate.

throwawayffffas 8 hours ago

I don't type 123456 either. I stop at 5.

holowoodman 10 hours ago

Next step in typical security team fashion: Prevent password managers from working, by obscuring the password field, using click-to-type passwords or similar shenanigans, because fuck you, that's why...

paulddraper 8 hours ago

You need a better team

Muromec 8 hours ago

We can't have nice things.

looperhacks 10 hours ago

Unless of course, you need to unlock your password manager, which is not integrated with your browser, because corporate IT doesn't allow browser extensions or desktop apps so you're bound to a web app ...

dudul 7 hours ago

Until security forces the password manager session to expire after 1 hour, and forces the master password to be 16 char long with a combination of lower, upper, digit, punctuation, moon phase, astrological sign. And then they force you to change it every 2 months, and you can't reuse it until the next time Halley's comet is in the solar system.

You're missing the systemic problem the parent is talking about.

nvme0n1p1 6 hours ago

None of those hypotheticals apply in a company where "123456" was allowed as a password to begin with.

And if even if they did, which of these two is easier?

1. Typing your 16 char password with the current moon phase once an hour, and remembering the new one every time a comet passes

2. Pressing your password manager keyboard shortcut (or tapping your yubikey) once an hour, the exact same action that never changes for the rest of your life

Dylan16807 3 hours ago

> None of those hypotheticals apply in a company where "123456" was allowed as a password to begin with.

True.

> And if even if they did, which of these two is easier?

You didn't understand their point. The password manager itself locks and tapping doesn't work until you put in the master password again.

altmanaltman 11 hours ago

Setting '123456' as a password on any non-trivial system is not "the shortest route possible to maximize their productivity." It would be setting the password as "000000"

ntoskrnl_exe 11 hours ago

I'm not sure, I think it's a little more ergonomical to hit six different keys compared to hitting a single key precisely six times.

nylonstrung 11 hours ago

The guys who are really into keyboard layouts would argue vehemently that 123456 is more ergonomic as it's an "inward roll" vs 6 consecutive presses of a key that aligns to the pinky

PunchyHamster 7 hours ago

121212 would probably be more ergonomic

kay_o 11 hours ago

Touch one hardware key for every interaction then, not 123456, the hell?

tokai 11 hours ago

Just because a task is hard it should never absolve anything. Guy could just have quit if he didn't want the responsibility.

zweifuss 10 hours ago

The account with the weak password was a former employee. It’s not on her/him that the account remained active and the admin password wasn't changed in the same process.

TehCorwiz 10 hours ago

Productivity and Aesthetics could also be said to be counter acting forces. Or really anything that requires contemplation. I think the problem is in how some people define "productive". Is it productive to have significant security problems which cause more work?

ddosmax556 10 hours ago

It's not that hard to enable 2fa & force password manager usage. And it's not that hard to use it. In fact a pw manager alone is much more convenient than remembering passwords. The only people I know who "can't remember their passwords and are locked out" are people who don't use the pw manager and have dogs*it passwords with tiny variants they forget. They often need multiple attempts to log in anywhere. Yeah 2fa & pw manager is a tick more complicated but it's not like it take hours, it takes minutes per day. And you protect against stuff like this. No sympathy, sorry.

Sick-Poster 10 hours ago

It is actually very hard to force password manager usage. You can encourage it, educate, but forcing it? How do you do that.

paulddraper 8 hours ago

Passkeys.

jackjeff 8 hours ago

Yeah. I prefer 2FA. My passwords look like 1bTsby#ZNaz1TJDDzglL&MmD&HOCMd^Cc and having a separate device with a TOTP token is more secure.

I won’t be victim of url jacking since the password manager feels the form. And if it can’t then the domain name is wrong.

And if you steal all the keys/passwords, unlike with pass keys, that’s not enough. I don’t like having all my eggs in one basket no matter how shiny.

paulddraper 4 hours ago

Passkeys are really long password locked to a domain, i.e. no different* than your setup.

Passwords are just a worse, hacky version of passkeys.

*They are private/public keys, so they can’t be MITM.

dwedge 10 hours ago

How do you force password manager usage?

misiek08 9 hours ago

Technically or socially? The second one is hard, the first one can be done easily - just require the passwords to be 14/16+ characters, multiple symbol domains and calculate tempo of input. Slower than 350ms between keystrokes - error message. Those who can type that fast already are using pw manager or you can just skip this 0.001%.

loglog 9 hours ago

Everyone's password is now 1q1q1q1q1q1q1q1q1q1q!Q

GuB-42 9 hours ago

Doing that will certainly get people to use a password manager.

But it doesn't say which password manager.

The most popular password manager is some text/word/excel document on the desktop.

jnovek 8 hours ago

I have no evidence to back this hypothesis, but I wonder if that’s still more secure than using bad passwords.

giveaccountpls 7 hours ago

Sorry, if your job title implies even a smidgen of security responsibility, you deserve to be fired for "123456" as your password. The person who was an administrator would fall under this label. Besides, "If productivity is not your goal, then security is not my goal." is what results in draconic security measures, because employees can't be trusted AT ALL. I really don't understand your comment.

ano-ther 11 hours ago

So it was actually two weaknesses:

* The non-password at a two-person IT company (Pays ApS)

* And then completely unchecked access to the CPR database for 22 days which apparently does not have monitoring or limits if someone tries to access all the records (they must have made some 16k downloads per hour).

tuwtuwtuwtuw 11 hours ago

There's also the weakness that the security relies ok this information being secret. Denmark make use the personal numbers for a form of authentication, but the numbers are readable to many people. In sweden, this data is public by design. Authentication happens using public/private key and other secure mechanisms.

olau 11 hours ago

Just to expand slightly on this: Some old procedures, probably from the main frame age, live to this day in old institution, including the belief that you can ask people about their personal number over the telephone and auth them that way.

I don't think any IT infrastructure is doing it, it's all by a national single-sign on system.

tuwtuwtuwtuw 11 hours ago

I will expand a bit further - all the data that was compromised in this breach is public by design in sweden, as far as I know. Not just the personal numbers.

nylonstrung 11 hours ago

Personal numbers and social security numbers in US are horrible idea, essentially a password and username simultaneously

Symbiote 9 hours ago

Authentication in Denmark also uses cryptographic signatures etc.

The CPR alone is used for casual identification.

mrweasel 10 hours ago

The "fun" part is that it was only caught because the bill for the lookups was higher than expected. Had the attackers done a lookup every now and then, nobody would have noticed.

Apparently no one cares, until it becomes a financial issue. IT professionels have pointed out that the system is deeply flawed for 15 - 20 years, at least, but every issue has been papered over with more IT, tweaks to software and websites. The fundamental issues have never been addressed.

The average Dane doesn't even care. They'll just complain that they need to scan their health card, rather than shouting their CPR number across the pharmacy. Thousands of people have access to the system every day, abuse happens daily, but no one seems to care, because there hasn't been an actual costs associated with that abuse.

criemen 3 hours ago

I'd add missing MFA as weakness number three, at minimum. Problem number 4 is that the "password" was leaked, and the company (Pays ApS) didn't figure that out. Problem number 5 - the "password" belonged to a _former_ employee. How was that account not disabled? Problem number 6 - how can a company with two employees get access to this register in the first place? Don't they need to show compliance with some security standard that would be not possible to deliver for such a small company?

If you start thinking more about this, more and more problems pop up.

piker 12 hours ago

That’s the same combination I have on my luggage!

Sau1707 12 hours ago

I bet you are not the only one!

justinclift 12 hours ago

The Spaceballs piece about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a6iW-8xPw3k

HPsquared 12 hours ago

Funnily enough, luggage calls back to those TSA locks.

bryanrasmussen 11 hours ago

the same price of a large pizza where I used to work as a delivery guy! Those pizzas were way expensive.

wrecked_em 10 hours ago

Props to you, good sir. You beat me by one hour.

johnboiles 9 hours ago

I think a number of us immediately searched 'luggage'

dec0dedab0de 10 hours ago

I don’t normally upvote jokes on hn, but it’s saturday and I was about to say the same thing.

libria 7 hours ago

Way off topic, they're getting the band back together next year, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt32659463/.

Fingers crossed this late sequel parody somehow duplicates the original's charm. It would be embarrassing for Disney if it's better written/received than their own attempt with the source material.

cortesoft 5 hours ago

My first thought was "maybe security compliance training should include mandatory screening of Spaceballs"

Which does remind me of my game theory class in college... the professor would show movie scenes that demonstrated the game model we would be studying that week. It was quite effective, and certainly helped keep me engaged.

ptnpzwqd 11 hours ago

It is easy to blame the company or individual responsible for making the leak possible, and of course also well justified, but I think the bigger problem is the way the CPR number is used.

Having a unique number that is needed for identifying individuals, but also often used for authentication and thus meant to be kept secret, is bound to go wrong. There are too many situations where these use cases are in conflict, and considering Denmark has MitID - a actual national authentication solution - the CPR number should have been considered public information a long time ago, and shouldn’t ever be usable for obtaining credit or the like on its own. A system keeps insisting this is sensitive information is really the main responsible here.

boxed 11 hours ago

> Having a unique number that is needed for identifying individuals, but also often used for authentication and thus meant to be kept secret, is bound to go wrong

That's also not how they are used. They're maybe the username, but never the password, and absolutely not supposed to be secret. They are supposed to be extremely public.

ptnpzwqd 9 hours ago

I think you mean that isn’t how they are meant to be used. If that was consistently the case in practice, however, no one would talk about this leak (at least not the CPR number part of it).

I doubt the CPR number alone will give you access to obtain credit and the like today, but you can absolutely go into a pharmacy and buy someone’s prescription medicine with just their CPR number, and you for sure can get access to a lot of data by calling various entities and providing your CPR number as proof of identity (but at least fewer now than used to be the case in the past).

If the CPR number was truly made public information, those cases would be much more obviously wrong. The fact that CPR numbers are de facto considered pseudo-secret makes things much worse.

ninalanyon an hour ago

> you can absolutely go into a pharmacy and buy someone’s prescription medicine with just their CPR number

In Norway I have to show photographic ID and my fødselsnummer.

mr_mitm 9 hours ago

Are we positive the account was enabled? If what I think happened, happened, then they dumped Active Directory password hashes, in which case you don't see the account status by default when using popular tools. I sometimes do password analyses for corporations, and in the beginning, when I reported a few particularly weak passwords of particularly powerful accounts, they often told me that this was an account which had been disabled years ago, so this wasn't useful information to them. Eventually I started filtering out disabled accounts.

Then again, it sounds like this organization had many issues. (Why was the former employee's account still enabled? Why didn't they mandate MFA?)

IceDane 9 hours ago

Why would you think active directory has anything to do with this? That seems like a super random conclusion.

What happened is they found the password and email for an employee in a dump online - possibly for a different service, we don't know. If so, then the password was reused.

saghm 8 hours ago

I mostly agree with you, but it's worth considering that there are much more fundamental issues with absolutely abysmal passwords like "123456" . If my password is "ra1nbowC0okies776", and it shows up in another place, it's a pretty strong signal that I reused it, because it's unlikely to have been picked independently by someone else. If my password is "password", even if I never reuse it, that's still far worse than me reusing the password above.

IceDane 7 hours ago

That is completely irrelevant to anything I said. No one on hacker news thinks that using 123456 as a password is a good idea.

saghm 5 hours ago

You said the password was "reused". I think that's a poor framing and was pointing out.

mhd 11 hours ago

They should've just written it in Danish, nothing seems more secure than how they construct numbers. The 56 part would've been "six-and-half-triple-score" or something similarly insane.

krabat 9 hours ago

seks og halvtreds six plus two and a half times twenty

xquce 9 hours ago

As a Dane I agree, but try constructing 13-19 in English. We just did it from 13-99.

However Im sad that now our national password is out :(

sokols 12 hours ago

I think that the third parties who have been granted access to the civil registry should be audited on a regular basis for the “best practices” of the day. Similar to the participants of the payment systems like VISA or MC that are regularly audited for PCI standards.

iLoveOncall 12 hours ago

Or simply make people who choose insecure passwords criminally responsible for the fallout.

bryanrasmussen 11 hours ago

and make the people who didn't put any sort of limits on how many records can be downloaded before there has to be a check on what is going on or any of the other stupid security holes that were found, make them criminally responsible as well. At some point you can be sure you'll be imprisoning someone for making a typing mistake (accidentally commented out some code) or a logic mistake (I should have said IS NOT, but instead I said IS) or just being tired.

zweifuss 11 hours ago

A least privilege access redesign seems reasonable too. And abuse monitoring; the leak went on for 21 days undetected.

mvkel 9 hours ago

> According to the hacker, access was initially obtained using a leaked password belonging to a former employee of a small Danish company.

So the password could have been 32 alphanumerics with special characters and there still would have been a breach.

The password was not the problem here.

mr_mitm 9 hours ago

There are typically quite a few steps between initial access and domain domination, which I assume is what they ended up with, considering they have administrator account passwords. Well, unless you are using 123456 as the password for an admin account.

IceDane 9 hours ago

Yes and no.

The problem with the compromised platform is that it had no MFA. If they had just had something like OAuth via google workspace or something, this most likely could have been avoided. But it seems like they just had completely vanilla email/password auth with zero additional security measures.

zweifuss 12 hours ago

I’m less shocked than I should be. National ID registries can be incredibly convenient, but when something goes wrong, it can go terribly wrong. Despite my general misgivings, I hope the IT company is visibly held accountable.

sethammons 12 hours ago

What would that accountability look like?

gunalx 12 hours ago

Not existing preferably.

tannertech 12 hours ago

Strange way to say prison time. Or if you meant capital punishment harsh but fair.

tossandthrow 11 hours ago

This is the likely outcome. It was a company employing 2 people.

lifestyleguru 12 hours ago

Intensify the "beware of scammers and identity thief" campaign. Go all in - unblockable SMS's, emails, and notifications. Treat any feedback and objection as an attack.

n0rdy 8 hours ago

Unfortunately, the humans' laziness (or lack of long-term thinking) was, is and will be a bottleneck.

If we technically restrict the minimum length to, let's say, 12 chars, the default passwords will be smth like `123456789012`. If we add the requirement to have 1 letter, at least, the passwords will be `12345678901a`. If we require a special character, we'll get smth like `1234567890a!`.

I believe the issue is not technical, and it's not about the one particular guy. It is about accountability and understanding the impact and responsibility of the "I don't care"/"whatever"/"ship fast" mindsets.

We need a proper social agreement for that, as this goes far beyond the passwords, especially these days when the quantity and speed are valued over quality.

GoToRO 8 hours ago

There was a time when you would get a truly random password sent, every X months.

n0rdy 8 hours ago

Sorry, I might be too young to remember those times. Can you tell me more, please? I'm genuinely curious.

Because from the sound of that, it feels that it would patch the `123456` problem, but opens up a new vulnerability - the password is known / being sent through / printed, so it can be leaked from that source.

GoToRO 7 hours ago

It was just that. And email with the new password. Hard to remember at first but then, somehow, I could type it from memory. Not sure how they got rid of the emails after they sent them but there are ways. It can be leaked from the source, true, but people with better technical skills were handling that source. So I guess overall it was better. The big insight might be that you can't evaluate the security of a system only from the technical aspect. You have to take into consideration also the human aspect. And that's a very weak point. Even Communism failed because they didn't take into consideration the human aspect (people don't want to work more if they get what everybody else gets anyway).

MYEUHD 8 hours ago

How about making the passords longer but easier to memorize? (no digit / letter / special character requirement)

https://xkcd.com/936

n0rdy 8 hours ago

That would work from the technical point of view, I do agree.

On the other hand, how would we make "lazy" people use those? And ensure that won't reuse the same password on some vibe coded forum that will store them in the plain text and get hacked in a few weeks =)

That's why I mentioned that mindset shift as the prerequisite.

verelo 10 hours ago

Personal pet peeve undefined acronyms, "CPR": Central Person Register. For those who didn't know, like me, and had to look it up.

Frieren 8 hours ago

I always find the use of acronyms a lack of education and manner. A way for the uneducated to try to sound sophisticated.

When I get an internal mail with multitude of acronyms I know that the people that wrote it does not care if anyone is going to read/understand it or not. It goes directly into the trash.

bazoom42 5 hours ago

Something is fishy about this story though. The credentials used was allegedly leaked and purchased on the black market. But the it doesn’t matter how weak or strong the password is.

The information about the leaked password is from the guy claiming to be the hacker who anonymously talked to the media.

wrecked_em 11 hours ago

That's the kind of password an idiot would have on his luggage.

mattlondon 11 hours ago

If only they had insisted on a secure 8 character password!

fifilura 11 hours ago

1Password#

Oops, can I delete my comment, it was a copy paste mistake!

lifestyleguru 11 hours ago

> **********

> Oops, can I delete my comment, it was a copy paste mistake!

What do you mean? You can safely post your passwords on the internet.

_kb 11 hours ago

hunter2

dotancohen 7 hours ago

When you post, you see hunter2, but everybody else sees *****.

LarsKrimi 11 hours ago

There are some unconfirmed rumors going that the maximum password length for the API was 8 characters...

walrus01 11 hours ago

hunter2#

eviks 11 hours ago

Yes, S in Government stands for Security, C - for Competence (or caring about your data), and D - for system Design

rr808 10 hours ago

At this stage all SSN, NI numbers, CPR etc should just be made public. Its assuming its some kind of secret is the problem. Its an ID not a password.

krabat 9 hours ago

CPR is code for "registersamkøring". Register matching. The small wellfare nation needing to be able to see the populace as a sum of abilities and leanings and willingness to be swayed and pushed to support present and future economic needs of the whole.

IceDane 9 hours ago

.... what?

howard941 4 hours ago

It flows nicely on the numeric pad

skc 8 hours ago

We really missed a trick by not normalising the term passphrase.

WaitWaitWha 6 hours ago

Beyond the weaknesses already mentioned, why did the system allow such weak passwords in the first place?

donalhunt 12 hours ago

In Denmark, a CPR number (short for Det Centrale Personregister, or Central Person Register) is a unique 10-digit personal identification and social security number assigned to every resident and citizen.

Equivalent to social security information in the US I guess.

lordnacho 12 hours ago

It's unique, but it encodes your birthday and sex.

There's only 500 numbers it could be, assuming someone knows those other things about you.

In any case, there are alternative systems for authorisation.

usrnm 11 hours ago

You're contradicting yourself, how can it be unique if only 1000 can be assigned per given date of birth? What if more than one thousand babies are born in the country one day?

piva00 11 hours ago

It's Denmark, it won't have 1k babies born the same day.

It's the same in Sweden: YYYY-MM-DD-XXXX is the format for a personnummer, double the population of Denmark and there are no collisions.

ls65536 11 hours ago

That format looks like it would allow for up to 10k per day. Unless one of those X's is a check digit?

onionisafruit 11 hours ago

They said sex is encoded in it, so it’s probably a sex digit.

edit: I was wrong. Wikipedia says, “The first digit of the sequence number encodes the century of birth (so that centenarians are distinguished from infants)”.

It also says “the last digit of the sequence number is odd for males and even for females”. What a strange system. Essentially the last three digits are two different sequences made to look like one.

polack 11 hours ago

There have been collisions in Sweden, but that was due to lots of immigrants coming from the middle east that did not know when they where born. So many of them picked first of January. They “solved” it by overflowing to the next days.

piva00 7 hours ago

Completely forgot about the YYYY-01-01 case!

Thanks for correcting it :)

madmoose 11 hours ago

Immigrants who don't know their birthdate are assigned xxxx-01-01, so they have actually run out of numbers for January 1st in some years.

tannertech 11 hours ago

That's a problem for future Denmark!

gus_massa 11 hours ago

For some unknown reason, the SSN in USA is assumed to be secret. You go to the bank, say SSN=12345 and they give you a million dollars and then send the collector the the guy/gal with that number, and call it identity thief instead of bad bank security or fraud.

Here in Argentina, the DNI is assumed to be public, it appears in a lot of public documents next to your name, and on election day there is a list of all the local voters with name and DNI at the door of the pooling site. To pay a sweater in two installments you may need to present the phisical DNI card and a water or electricity bill and they photocopy all of them.

Mashimo 10 hours ago

I'm not super familiar with SSN in US of A, but I think the Danish one is not has secret. Don't get me wrong, the leak is not good, but there is a limit to what you can do with it.

Targeted and real looking spam mails come to mind. Hey <NAME> with <Address> and <CPR>, you have to log in <fake government website> to verify X Y Z.

Apparently some pay day loans or similar with just CPR + name is or was a thing. But lets hope that will change now. Bonkers as CPR should be be treaded as a secret.

INTPenis 12 hours ago

I love getting to the root cause of these incidents. Hate it when they just move on with no post mortem, the rest of us are trying to learn here!

Like the recent ransomware attack on a Swedish Svedala municipality, still no root cause published on that?

throw5976543f 7 hours ago

Is this cultural?

When things like this happen in Asian countries, you always see a lot of people here comment about how “the culture” contributed to it.

So I’m wondering if there are any experts here who can explain if this is cultural too?

nashashmi 10 hours ago

Well, if you change to many settings, it will break. So don’t change anything. So it doesn’t break.

largbae 10 hours ago

That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life! The kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!