Discussion

Full Source Code of Sweden's E-Government Platform Leaked From Compromised CGI Sverige Infrastructure

robertlagrant: The source code is the least of it! From the article:> citizen PII databases and electronic signing documents were also collected but are being sold separately

worldsayshi: I wonder if the focus on source code makes Swedish news slower to jump on this. I haven't seen it in domestic news yet.

ACS_Solver: I saw it on SVT a few hours ago. DN and Expressen have also reported. The details about what exactly it is that got leaked are unclear (some report it's basically the code and certs responsible for BankID SSO) but this is certainly being reported domestically.

jetsetman192: Encryption keys are mentioned as well.

teroshan: Does anyone know if there is the source code for the Swedish Armed Forces - Team Test [1] in the leak? It was a really fun collaborative flash-style game that got popular in my circle of friends for some reason back then.[1] https://flashism.wordpress.com/2010/03/09/swedish-armed-forc...

AdamN: Yeah the source code isn't really such a big deal aside from helping to find vulnerabilities. The PII is a real disgrace.

rebolek: Maybe they should go open source from the start, then there's nothing to leak.P.S.: And strangers will sometimes help you find vulnerabilities (and sometimes be very obnoxious but that's not open source's fault).

steve1977: Is this the open source stuff everyone is talking about?

simonklitj: Man, you've got to be a real low-life to sell all of that.

blell: You've got to be a real low-life to collect all of that and put it in a database that is not air-gapped.

worldsayshi: In Aftonbladet comments from CGI they seem to think that no production related data has been leaked:https://www.aftonbladet.se/nyheter/a/ArvG0E/cgi-sverige-uppg...

lukan: If you need the data, you cannot have it air gapped. And if it is air gapped, it is still easy to make misstakes.

dns_snek: > it is still easy to make misstakes.That's not an excuse though, any system handling data like that should be continuously reviewed and pentested by professionals. Hopefully they can show that this has been done otherwise it's just negligence.

corroclaro: This keeps happening in Europe with these mega-IT suppliers repeatedly getting exposed using very bad development practices. Sweden most recently had a major breach back in 2024 when the other large IT services supplier TietoEvry had their data centres breached and claimed "not actually an issue of security".Several government organisations / regional authorities and companies were down. Last I heard several medical journals for whole municipalities were just destroyed.Unfortunately, the public tender process encourages awarding contracts to these giants that repeatedly fail to deliver on even basic opsec and still believe in security-by-obscurity, are suspicious of things like zero-trust, follow outdated engineering practices. Sigh.

bengale: The tender process is what they are optimised for. They are professional project bidders with a bit of outsourced software development bolted on the back.

dijit: The point of a system like this is specifically that it’s accessible and not air gapped.Being able to validate that a citizen is a citizen and their ID is valid inherently requires the system be accessible

yaris: As if it ever happened that a breached company admitted immediately that they've just been fucked.

noosphr: I like paper documents for this very reason.It's very hard to steal everyone's documents when they weight about the same as a train.

latexr: But it’s also very easy to lose all of them in a fire or flood. Different tradeoffs.

HelloUsername: > it’s easy to lose all of them in a fire or floodWouldn't a fire or flood affect everything? Both data stored on paper and hard disks?

jagged-chisel: The good news is you can keep offline, offsite digital copies, which is much more convenient than offsite paper copies.

vladms: > Unfortunately, the public tender process encourages awarding contracts to these giants that repeatedly fail to deliver on even basic opsec and still believe in security-by-obscuritySo what you think would be the solution ? From what I see (both public tender or not), I would claim that "any large IT project/company will suffer from security issues", so not sure what is the added value to single out a process (the tender) or a region (Europe) if there is no obvious alternative.

ptx: What does "electronic signing documents" mean? Keys used for signing or documents that were signed with electronic signing?

Lionga: How much GDPR fine will they pay? Oh wait it's gov so nothing / does no matter even if.Who will take responsibility and get fired and lose all pension etc.? Oh wait no one.Well the citizens need to suck it up.

the_other: As the attack actor now has the data, they're liable for ongoing GDPR failures, on top of the theft. Then anyone they sell the data to becomes liable (on top of handling stolen goods). Could be a money-earner for the EU if they pursue it properly.

lukan: It was mainly an explanation, that "airgapping" does not magically provides better security, or is required (or possible) to use at all here.

xorcist: It's something akin to a service provider in SAML parlance, if we are to believe reporting. How can it be air-gapped?And if we are to believe the hacked company, it is a development environment with test data in it. That remains to be seen, but is a risky thing to lie about. If there is production data in the leak, we will surely know about it.

UltraSane: At the high end you can use data diodes to isolate critical data.

yaris: Knowing swedish people's mindset I'm not surprised at all by the breach. What can be mildly surprising is that no major e-gov service has expressed concerns on their websites. Only on skatteverket.se, which is Swedish Tax Service website, there is a vague note on "maintenance work" planned for coming Saturday. Maybe totally unrelated though.

JensRantil: I am a Swedish citizen. Lived here for almost 40 years. It is a bit unclear to be what the "the Swedish e-government platform" is. Would have been great if they at least could have published which domain name the service has.

reliablereason: Nothing in particular, based on my understanding CGI a Swedish IT consultant company was hacked, they have contracts for and are the maintainers and developers of a bunch of various government departments IT services.

agluszak: e-government services should be open-sources by default!

nunobrito: Now there is an additional reason for that.Public money, public code.

ZaoLahma: Yeah. In these cases it's not like anyone is going to spin up their own instance and start competing with you.Government / handles society-critical things code should really be public unless there are _really_ good reasons for it not to be, where those reasons are never "we're just not very good at what we're doing and we don't want anyone to find out".

yaris: I would guess that skatteverket.se, polisen.se, kronofogden.se are among those affected by the leak.

einr: That's an interesting guess that I assume is based on absolutely nothing?

yaris: Yes, nothing and the facts that these are government services, they use BankID and they updated their websites with "maintenance work" announcements for tomorrow, Saturday. For kronofogden.se there was no maintenance planned just half an hour ago. Knowing swedish tendency to plan things months ahead I would _guess_ that this maintenance work has been rushed due to some circumstances.

einr: some report it's basically the code and certs responsible for BankID SSONo. CGI has nothing to do with BankID.IMO the most credible reports suggest that the source code and data involved are related to these four services:https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/e-tjanst... "Mina engagemang offers a user-friendly and flexible solution that allows your customers to manage their cases directly through a personal portal. Here, users can view, track, and interact with their ongoing cases, which enhances both transparency and efficiency in the communication process." -- some kind of ticket/case management system for gov't agencieshttps://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/elektron... "With our secure end-to-end e-ID and eSign services, we can help you streamline document and contract management, gain access to all desired e-ID issuers, and improve cost efficiency." -- this sounds like a bad thing to compromise, but is to the best of my understanding a system for digital signatures on documents, and has no relation to BankIDhttps://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/e-tjanst... "Gain better control over your organization’s representatives with our easy-to-use representative registry. By automating the identification and verification of representatives, you’ll gain a clear overview and enhance the security of your processes." -- sounds like some bullshit CRUD app for managing who can "represent" a gov't agencyhttps://www.cgi.com/se/sv/business-process-services/e-tjanst... "SHS is Sweden’s common standard for information exchange, enabling secure and efficient communication between government agencies, businesses, and organizations." -- this might be bad if real data was leakedThese are services used by various Swedish government agencies and it's pretty bad to have even a test instance of them hacked, but let's calm down. The entire Swedish state has not been compromised here.

xorcist: I have (the start of a) solution, but it's a boring one:You have to have people who care about this stuff.If you don't care, the rest does not matter. It does not matter if, when and how you outsource if you don't care about the outcome. You can't just pay someone a salary, nor a consulting bill, check the box and say you've done your part.And the other way around: These huge consulting conglomerates would get very few jobs if purchasers cared about the details, and not just that all the boxes are checked.

dns_snek: [delayed]

wayfwdmachine: Ok, some important context for non-Swedes. Anyone can get access to all Swedish (non-protected but those are a very VERY small subset) personal identification numbers by simply signing an agreement with SPAR[1] (the Swedish national people database). Identification numbers per se are not particularly useful or hard to get, they are effectively public information. Using SPAR you can also get the home (and any additional) addresses of individualsA Swedish citizen database is... you know. fun. But not exactly hard to get hold of.[1] https://www.statenspersonadressregister.se/master/start/engl...

petcat: > by simply signing an agreement with SPARBut that seems like a completely different thing than a nefarious and anonymous person or group having access to the entire database.

wasmitnetzen: Swedish news has some quotes from authorities that nothing of value has been leaked, and a quote from the service CGI that it only concerns test servers.[1][2][1]: https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/uppgift-statlig-it-inform...[2]: https://www.cgi.com/se/sv/news/cybersakerhet/cgi-informerar-...

whizzter: As a Swede this is giving me shudders, the statements reeks of paper-pushers and certification-chasers that don't seem to understand fundamental risks of how how threat actors can move around once having established footholds, hopefully there's more competent people down in the trenches.

einr: It's not going to be a specific service or agency with a domain name, it's going to be services that are either internal and used by employees only, or that are integrated into other systems that you may be interacting with without knowing it.

einr: It's quite possible that the maintenance is related, but I can nearly 100% assure you this has absolutely nothing to do with BankID. I don't know who suggested that but they are either poorly informed or actively trying to sow FUD.

mvdwoord: Germany has iirc liability for the entire chain (engineers to upper management) in case of data breaches. I remember having to sign for that when I did a project in Germany. Would that help? I would not mind if the CEO/CTO of Odido would spend a couple of years in a federal pound them in the ass prison if it is found out the leak was due to malpractice.

wayfwdmachine: Yeah, nefarious or anonymous people have never used the internet so they could never find out that this was all public information.

petcat: public information if they signed an agreement with the Swedish government?

einr: No, public information for anyone. You realize that if it's public information, then it's public, and anyone can re-publish it online? There are websites for that. I can get the complete identification number, home address, phone number, etc for any Swedish citizen (that does not have a protected identity) in less than a minute.

petcat: You can get all of that one-by-one? Or can you get the whole database at once?

einr: Identification numbers per se are not particularly useful or hard to get, they are effectively public informationThey are absolutely trivial to get. One click on mrkoll.se.

picafrost: I think this is good to highlight for non-Scandinavians.Scandinavian countries are extremely open and transparent in a way that might be shocking for Americans. For example, in Norway, I can check nearly anyone's brokerage account holdings, addresses, phone numbers, etc. on public websites. I can in theory look up anyone's tax filings.Personal identification numbers do not tend to be considered private in the same way that social security numbers in the US are.

einr: I cannot trivially get the whole database, no. But I kind of fail to see what a malicious actor would do with a large database of public information that they couldn’t otherwise do. The system is designed such that you can’t really do a lot of malicious stuff with just public data, and the stuff you can do (scam calls, etc) is probably not meaningfully more effective if you have the whole database than if you do manual lookups or web scraping. I’m open to being proved wrong about that however.Basically: obviously it's not desirable to have that full database in the hands of a malicious actor but I'm not sure it's such a big deal either. Again, it's public data by design.

bell-cot: Problems with well-known solutions 100 years ago:"Fireproof file rooms and cabinets in the 1920s were crucial for protecting business and government records during the rapid expansion of the industrial era. The era saw a massive shift from flammable wooden office furniture to robust, steel-based storage designed to resist both fire and water damage."That's a Google AI summary - but I've been in a fair number of buildings with such rooms. Thick concrete walls, heavy steel fire doors, no other openings, nothing but steel file cabinets in 'em, sealed electric light fixtures that look like they belong in a powder magazine (where one spark could kill everyone) - it's really simple tech.And "high ground" was a reliable flood protection tech several centuries before that.

latexr: Then add “earthquake” to the list, or “domestic terrorists or foreign country bombing the building”. Steelman the argument. It should be obvious the point isn’t “just fire and water specifically”, we’re not playing Pokémon.We have several historic examples of records being lost in natural disasters, and way more recent than 100 years ago.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Personnel_Records_Cen...It makes no difference that we might’ve prevented that with better building construction. We didn’t. Hindsight does not bring the records back.I’m not defending digital as always better or criticising physical. Like I said, “different tradeoffs”, meaning there are advantages and disadvantages to both, there’s no solution in which better in all situations.

elwebmaster: Anything taxpayer funded should be open source to begin with.

fsflover: https://publiccode.eu

nunobrito: If that is case, then it would have been wrong from the beginning for any government to keep hold of the private keys for the signature on my citizen card.Because in that case they can sign documents on my behalf without my permission. In a court case, it would be near impossible for me to prove that the government gave my private key to someone else and that it wasn't me signing an incriminating document.

whizzter: We might've lucked out here, there is some signature data on ID cards today and official _plans_ to make a government backed signing service, but practically _nobody_ uses them in practice to just revoking all those keys will be a minor issue.Currently most Swede's use a private bank consortisum controlled ID solution for most logins and signatures.

ROllerozxa: And then there are widespread amounts of identity theft and mapping out of minorities, but you may sleep well as everyone knowing where you do so is an important step in making sure corruption is no more, don't think too much about it.

Batman8675309: Just a few years ago this was about to change in Sweden.But they didn't change it, because "women should be able to look up the men that they date".

jonashus: > CGI has nothing to do with BankIDThat's incorrect. Skatteverket used CGI for BankID-login, I don't know if they still do. I have personal experience working on a BankID-login using CGI for another company and it is still active.Edit: I just confirmed Skatteverket still uses CGI for BankID-auth. "funktionstjanster" is CGI.

einr: OK, let me rephrase that: CGI, while they may "have something to do" with BankID in the sense that they have developed systems that integrate with it, does not itself develop BankID and does not hold any private keys for BankID.

einr: To the best of my understanding it means that a system made by CGI for digital signing of documents (as in: you get something like a PDF from a government agency and need to digitally sign it and send it back) has had its source code and/or some data belonging to it leaked.Skatteverket, the Swedish tax authority, has been quoted in media as confirming that they use CGI's system for digital document signing but that none of their data nor that of any citizens has been leaked.https://www.svt.se/nyheter/inrikes/uppgift-statlig-it-inform..."One of the government agencies that uses CGI’s services is the Swedish Tax Agency, which was notified of the incident by the company. However, according to the Swedish Tax Agency, its users have nothing to worry about.“Neither our data nor our users’ data has been leaked. It is a service we use for e-signatures that has been affected, but there is no data from us or our users there,” says Peder Sjölander, IT Director at the Swedish Tax Agency."

ptx: I apparently didn't phrase that very well. If what is the case? I was trying to ask which case was the case, not trying to claim that something specific was the case.I'm familiar with electronic signatures, and I know what documents are, but I have never heard the phrase "electronic signing documents" and don't know what that is supposed to mean. What kind of documents? Documents about signing, documents that were signed, documents in the sense that files containing keys could be considered documents, or what?

nunobrito: In Portugal we were early adopters for digital signatures on citizen cards.You use the card reader, insert your gov-issued identification and can sign PDF papers which have legal validity since the private key from the citizen card was used.Now imagine someone signing random legal documents with your ID for things like debts, opening companies or subscritions to whatever.

whynotmaybe: I heard a rumor that some people use this to check their neighbour's revenue and sometimes make snark comments if one of them has a high revenue but lives in a "average revenue" part of town.They'd say that if you earn a lot, you shouldn't take a cheap housing.Any truth to that?

sorum: Yep, that tracks.There's also the underlying current of Jantelagen (Law of Jante) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

jjgreen: "misstakes", love it, almost peotic

internet_points: Making snark comments about that sounds very unlikely. More likely they'd have respect for someone living frugally and not showing off. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Law_of_Jante

latexr: > You have to have people who care about this stuff.What?! Preposterous! How could you even make money out of that? No no no, that will not do. You will ask your AI agent some vague question, commit the result without review and push it to the client. And you’ll like it. If there’s any trouble, call Timothy, he’ll be on vacation with his family in Thailand. Some resort, “Lotus” something or other.

xorcist: You may not like the trivial answer: The same way as we do everything else. How do we get people to show up for work? How do we get people to respect data security boundaries? None of these are questions of technology. The answer is culture. We need to create a strong shared culture of caring, by hiring people that care and putting them in an environment where caring is appreciated.

noosphr: This is a feature not a bug.

latexr: That depends entirely on what the records hold and who is interpreting the event.

bkummel: I see comments about Swedish personal identification numbers. But the article is about source code that's leaked, not a database of numbers, right? I was thinking: should government source code not be open source anyway?

ale: Yes and no. You get notified if someone else actually asks for your revenue info and so in practice nobody actually does it.

brabel: Some other comments mention BankID private keys . That would be the biggest disaster as that’s what everyone uses to identify themselves “securely” on all government services.

mrkickling: The private keys in BankID are stored in users phones, not centrally.

ivell: How do they have handle identity thefts, spams, etc.?There are so many ways to misuse these data. Are the residents not concerned about this?

boxed: It's just a unique ID of a person, it's not a password. I don't see how you can be confused by this.

arcticfox: Is this not trivial to get a random person to check stuff for you in exchange for making requests for them (on people they are interested in)? Or is that illegal?

ptx: So if no data was leaked from the tax agency or from the users, then the leaked "digital signing documents" must have belonged to the only remaining party, which is CGI, so perhaps they were just some marketing documents about the benefits of their digital signing service?

vodkapump: There's paid services that pull it for you, most charging around 100nok (10eur) per lookup.[1]Media is also allowed to pull "top" lists like the 100 people with the most income in a city, 100 people with the most wealth in a city, etc.[1] https://sjekkskatt.no/

teroshan: Similarly taxpayer funded contracts for any type of infrastructure (obviously I have digital infrastructure powered by proprietary solutions in mind) should only be awarded if interoperability is guaranteed to prevent lock-in and abuse.

einr: The original phrasing from the attacker, from the website that put the data up for download/sale, was ”documents (for electronic signing)” which implies that they’re documents that would be signed in said system. I would take all of this with a large helping of salt though. CGI claims it’s not real production data anyway; maybe it is and maybe it’s not.The best case scenario is in line with what CGI claims: these are lorem ipsum fake docs from an old git repo for a test instance of the system.

matsemann: When I worked for the government in Norway, it slowly changed to all code being developed in the open. 3k repos here now: https://github.com/orgs/navikt/repositoriesWhen I started it was a big security theater. Had to develop on thin clients with no external internet access, for instance. Then they got some great people in charge that modernized everything.Only drawback is when you quit, you have to make sure to unsubscribe from everything, hehe. When quitting a private company I was just removed from the github org. Here I was as well, but I was still subscribed to lots of repos, issues, PRs,heh.

ExoticPearTree: Split giant projects into small ones, award it to better smaller companies, require interoperability via API that is clearly documented and ask for around the clock security monitoring and patching. The last things being the same thing you do at any decent private company.IBM or Accenture or whoever don't need to be the only ones winning tenders.

ExoticPearTree: The probleme here is that what tends to happen is that the security requirements are relatively vague and once the customer has signed the acceptance, good luck.And signing up with a big company is good way to cover your behind, because "if they with all their people and knowledge could not do it...". Basically the mantra or "Nobody was ever fired for buying Cisco".

ROllerozxa: > How do they handle identity theftsBy just accepting it as a normal fact of life that you will have some random stuff ordered in your name sooner or later with an invoice you'll have to dispute. Happened to a relative of mine, police do not care unless they order things above a certain value, without a police report you cannot get free ID protection, and then you'll have to sit for a long time in phone queues trying to cancel a subscription for a streaming service or whatever they ordered while get thrown around by support reps who go "you SURE you or someone in your family didn't order this?"

PowerElectronix: That sounds rather unacceptable.

ruszki: What is the harm in this case? Shit people are shit even without information. They would be snark about something else then.

concats: Just knowing someone's name, address, and ID number isn't enough to like, open a bank account in their name or such. You'd need a proper ID card or passport for that. Similar thing with most businesses if you try to pay for some product with credit, they won't accept just a few digits and a pinky promise, you'll need to identify yourself properly (the BankID app for instance).

ROllerozxa: Yes, I don't think anyone truly wants it to be like this. But it's just what happens.You of course cannot access and empty out someone's bank account this way, you're safe in that regard. But you need to dispute the invoices as soon as possible to show that it is fradulent, so you don't end up needing to actually pay for it. Or get debt collectors after you.

guenthert: We just change our identity every three years or so.https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BK2gKuqbOHo

PeterisP: The root cause of identity theft in USA and some other places is the lack of "proper" national identity and the associated use of various personal "secrets" (not that secret) for identity verification because there are no good easy other ways.Businesses in Scandinavia and many other countries would not treat someone knowing your personal information as any evidence of identity (because it's not); having all that information is not sufficient to impersonate you there - identity theft does happen but it would require stealing or forging physical documents or actual credentials to things like bank accounts; knowing all of what your mother or spouse would know is not enough to e.g. get credit or get valuable goods in your name.

miki123211: The US has no single national photo + chip ID card that is available to everybody, for free, including illegal and semi-illegal immigrants and homeless people with no access to their birth certificate and such.It's completely crazy to me that you can be "out of status" with the USCIS and still get a social security card and a bank account, for example.

maest: It basically never happens. I don't know where the GP got their story from.

xorcist: "Identity theft" is newspeak right up there with "intellectual property". It serves the sole purpose of diminishing real theft. If someone says "we gave all your money to this other guy, but it's not our fault because he had stolen your identity" doesn't make it so. There are cases of mistaken identity, and with criminal intentions, but there is also an enormous majority of not checking identity because someone was lazy.

corroclaro: Absolutely. One of the root causes for these terrible tender processes is a fear of in-housing competence and skill for systems.It's the same reason major govt. IT orgs keep pushing for closed source (recently the Swedish Tax Authority was in the media for _pushing for Office 365_ as necessary for operations), out-sourced designs, big firm purchases over FOSS or real standards.You need people that care (and they exist, even in the gigantic state orgs.) in positions to make good decisions. Right now, everything is up in the hands of nebulously defined managerial staff with none-to-doubtful technical competence.Another recent case: the Swedish digital exams platform flopped at a rough cost of a billion SEK. Can't sustain 150K concurrent users, despite paying a "large company". Like, come on.

kivle: We're so open, we even leak our government source code _ourselves_ https://github.com/navikt

valzam: Uff, COBOL written in Norwegian, talk about a narrow target to hit for hiring :)

scottyah: Who needs a Jones Act when you can have processes like these?

vladde: CGI has a lot of consultants in both government and municipal places (i've worked at both), and some of our main tools like time reporting was built as a addon to our personnel system by consultants at CGI. half my team are consultants from CGI, 4 out of 7 people.also: hi tavro! it's been a few years, how have you been :D

sandos: I dont know nothing about this particular leak, but I have worked at Skatteverket.Let me just say, the likelihood that CGI would have any _actual_ real personal data is close to 0%, at least on servers outside of Skatteverket. I had access to absolutely nothing even working inside. I have never worked in a more closed-down system, maybe excepting the swedish military "complex". No, actually that was less locked down in a way, at least once you were "inside" the system.

stevekemp: Which is what leads to this comedy:https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CS9ptA3Ya9E

embedding-shape: > They'd say that if you earn a lot, you shouldn't take a cheap housing.I think a lot of "humbleness" is also enforced this way, in the US seems normal (or even some European countries) to flaunt your wealth, and others seem more or less OK with it, while it's much more socially unacceptable to in any sort of way brag about being rich, or showing that off. Humble-richness is OK and tolerated, but flagrantly displaying your wealth among the public is generally frowned upon.So together with that, living in a average neighborhood but have a house that sticks out as clearly "rich person's house" will gain you evil looks from your neighbors, as you're "supposed to" live in a different neighborhood where neighbors look more equal.Lots of culture in Sweden is less about "lets correctly solve the problem" and more "lets ensure the gaping holes aren't so visible for everyone, so we can ignore it properly".

butz: Most important question: do Swedish e-government services use curl?

ROllerozxa: Oh yes. I'm Swedish and I do have to admit I have looked up quite a lot of people on these kinds of sites. It's become so normalised to do this even though I also feel like it would be better as a whole if they just did not exist in the first place.Last update I heard about something being done about it was this:https://www.regeringen.se/pressmeddelanden/2024/11/utredning...Not sure what the current status is.

heraldgeezer: I am also Swedish!And I disagree with your entire posts, and probably how you vote.You criticize these websites when they affect minorities, but you use them yourself to look up men. That seems inconsistent. Why is it okay for your own use but not for others?Why are minorities so protected? :)

deaux: > You criticize these websites when they affect minorities, but you use them yourself to look up men. That seems inconsistent.This is very close to the "Yet you participate in society, how curious" mean, especially since they're implying they would vote in favor of a law that changes it so that the data is no longer public in the same manner.But then your comment history reveals enough about your intent.

heraldgeezer: I live here so I can add my experience, thank you.Speak clearly, what do you have an issue with exactly in my comment history?

FateOfNations: The same attackers are releasing the database of personal information separately (for a fee).That said, Sweden takes a different approach to PII, so most of that information would have already been public. You can generally just look up any resident and their ID number and other biographical details in a public directory (among other things… their tax returns are also public records).

jmusall: Very cool! Do they accept external contributions, e.g. from Norwegian citizens? Also, was there any thought given to "digital souvereignty" (wondering because the repos are hosted on a US service)?I'm also surprised that you were able to (or expected to?) use your private GitHub account for your work.

PeterStuer: Misleading title, as my first thought was "why is Sweden's egov not open source to begin with?".Turns out it's about data.

Hikikomori: >Why are minorities so protected? :)Because it's the law, and it's a good thing as governments and people tend to use violence against minorities. Don't like it? Move to a more racist country like Israel.

heraldgeezer: Are you Swedish? I am discussing our own situation.But of course you are anti-Semitic and anti-west. Please move to the Third World as you clearly want the west to degenerate to their level.

daneel_w: Unlike American SSNs, which are secret and wields a certain authoritative power, a Scandinavian "person number" is neither secret nor authoritative. Common misconception.

eitland: It absolutely isn't free here in Norway either, around $86 is what I'd have to pay now to get an id card as an adult (same price as a passport but easier to carry).

torginus: I have a friend who has moved to Sweden a while ago, and she told me a lot about the Swedish housing situation, and admittedly most if it went over my head, but in short, apparently very few places would even allow you to build even somewhat freely.Apparently she was in a situation where she 'owned' her house, but still paid a monthly maintenance fee to some agency. and she wasn't allowed to repaint the rooms or do any sort of repairs, but had to go through some agency, who would do it for her.Apparently that was a neighborhood thing, but she told me of epic (and apparently fruitless) struggles of her friends' who wanted to repaint their house in a different color and install some circular windows.

lysace: Take a step back.What, exactly is the connection between your uninformed story and the incorrect - and not unlikely Russo-Iranian propaganda HN post we are in?

fmbb: Well doesn’t Relying Parties using the BankID API for signatures and authentication have private keys to start the flows for users scanning QR codes etc?Could you, having the right private keys, impersonate some company soliciting a BankID signature?I’m not sure what you can do with that though. You cannot steal some other ongoing signature I guess.

matsemann: Not sure how it is now, but when I worked there ~8 years ago we weren't really equipped to accept contributions. Both from a licensing perspective (CLA), but also that we had our own timelines, projects and prioritizations in the team. So most applications were open source more in the sense of source available. Some utils (like generators for Norwegian mock data, or libraries handling Norwegian addresses or whatever) that were actively used by other companies could get some proper contributions once in a while, though.

lysace: That might be interesting but it’s also completely irrelevant since no PII was actually leaked.

torginus: Hold on, I was sharing an anecdote from a friend living in a foreign country, and somehow you're somehow connecting this to a dastardly geopolitical plot by a league of evil nations?Also may I ask who the heck you are to call my story uninformed? As far as I recall, there's nothing inaccurate about what I said, I might be missing some context or nuance, but there's no disinformation in there, and there's certainly no hidden motive (what would even that be?) you seem to imply.

alentodorov: what

lysace: Yup

lysace: ”and admittedly most if it went over my head””Apparently she was in a situation where she 'owned' her house, but still paid a monthly maintenance fee to some agency.”(This is not the norm. I can go into a lot more detail if you want to.)I am not accusing you of disinformation. I am saying that are writing completely irrelevant stuff in a story that is, as far as I can see is mostly false and has a high probability of being propaganda related to current conflicts.And yes, dozens of other people did the same.The only connection is the country.

victorbjorklund: Of course ID theft happens but I think one thing that differs is that in Sweden it is harder to get a loan without verification that you are who you are (for example by Swedish BankID wish is an electronic id) while in US it seems you can take a loan if you just know someone’s social security number

pastage: You can start a signing process saying you are who ever owned that certificate. E.g. if you call someone. You can not use those signatures to gain access, and it is rather in phishing.

dworks: You can trivially purchase the data from Bisnode Dun & Bradstreet Sverige.

dworks: Yes, you can buy the database for the entire population. There are commercial vendors for this, one of them is Dun & Bradstreet (Bisnode Dun & Bradstreet Sverige).

heraldgeezer: I am Swedish and never had this happen to me. Never had random things show up or ordered for me at all. What would the point be, you have to pay or get an invoice? For Klarna they use BankID so only I can order an invoice for myself in reputable shops.I am in my 30s btw so I was alive before BankID and it was a worse time. Remember my parents paid bills with paper.

dworks: The OP didn't claim it had happened to you. What they said is that it is possible to use the information about regular individuals that is publicly available to cause harm, and there are no attempts to stop this.

heraldgeezer: It is possible but it is not widespread.

dworks: Go back and edit your original comment because it is irrelevant and misleading.

heraldgeezer: No, I don't think I will.

hrimfaxi: In the US, property tax records are public by design. However, historically the records were physical and hard to search through. Now that these records are digitized and published online, it is trivial to find out where someone resides by searching through these records. So while public by design, at scale data aggregation changes the threat model.

kevin_thibedeau: Phone books gave out most people's home address. There were data brokers transcribing them (before reliable OCR) to build their databases.

gwerbin: Out of curiosity how do you authenticate yourself with government services and finance companies and such? The reason the SSN is considered private is because it's used for authentication. Usually an SSN + one or two pieces of trivially obtainable information is enough to sign up for just about anything in somebody else's name, unless physical documents are required as in the case of a passport.

modin: With cryptographic keys, normally stored on a smartphone. BankID[0] is the most common solution, but there are others. I personally use biometric 2fa to log in, and PIN to sign contracts or pay.[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BankID_(Sweden)

Saline9515: What's the point of making public how much each person owns? Aside from making you a prime target for kidnappings and targeted advertising?

Saline9515: There are plenty of reports online about how identity theft is becoming widespread in Sweden. The fact that something didn't happen to you is not evidence.https://ocindex.net/assets/downloads/2025/english/ocindex_pr...https://swedenherald.com/article/biometric-data-to-stop-fals...

SoftTalker: "Identity theft" is a term invented to push the responsibility for fraud back on the person who is being impersonated rather than on the person or organization that failed to properly identify the impersonator.

SoftTalker: The US used to be more this way. Not brokerage accounts as far as I recall, but whether you own a house, how much you paid for it, your address, phone number, even your SSN didn't used to be considered very private, people had it printed on their personal checks, and schools used it as a student ID number.Newspapers used to publish hospital admissions and discharges, nothing medical but names and dates. Probably a lot of other stuff I'm forgetting.

Saline9515: Identity theft and scams are widespread in Sweden and the most increasing crime currently.https://ocindex.net/assets/downloads/2025/english/ocindex_pr...

patall: Probably just didn't really buy the house. Many houses are part of an association (BRF). When you buy one, you practically only buy the right to live in the house plus a share of the entire association. The fee that she paid was towards that association for things like maintainance, managment, trash-fees, internet, parking, likely heating and water, and possibly interest on the associations loan. It's just a different structure that many countries have for flats in a building, in this case applied to single family houses.

skissane: Here in Australia, I’ve seen what we call “strata title” applied to “single family homes” before (American terminology, we call them “detached houses”) - it is uncommon, much more common with apartment buildings or townhouses/villas/semidetached (you share walls and maybe the roof with your neighbours, but there is no one above or below you)-but not completely unheard of

analyst74: People in safe countries generally do not worry about kidnappings.

kalleboo: Tax data is government data. Government data is public data. Instead of asking "what's the reason for making something public" the question is "what's the reason for making a carveout for some specific data to make it secret"

Saline9515: Government data about private individuals can be considered as private, for privacy reasons. If the government knows that I have a mental disability, should everyone know about it, so they can discriminate me accordingly? What kind of dystopian view of the world is this?Or, if I own crypto, why should the government facilitate the work for criminals?

deepsun: I see mostly Java/Kotlin and Maven.Pretty modern stack. I would start a government service using those today.

kivle: He is probably talking about this repo: https://github.com/navikt/DSFDescription translated:> This system was one of the oldest IT systems in NAV, and ran in production for 51 years, from when the National Insurance Scheme was introduced in 1967. In January 2018, Presys was put into production, which together with Pesys became the successor to DSF. At that point, DSF was also shut down. The system is written in PL/I.It's like the Apollo 11 code, but for social services.

skissane: Mostly PL/I but a few files of COBOL too, e.g. https://github.com/navikt/DSF/blob/main/src/GML/FO04D1X1.cob...

vladms: The total number of people working on the project might remain similar no matter if it's one company or many smaller companies. Writing clear documentation and API, well thought from the start is harder the larger the project.Maybe there would be a benefit from having less layers of management, but multiple small companies or one big could have the same structure.

ExoticPearTree: A smsller company would have a flatter structer and less management.Waiting for my coffee now, I had a thought: what if you have more than one company providing the same service and for a project “lifetime” of say 5 years, the money is split procentually by what company attracts the more users and you make it so that for the services offered through this you can only use one company, but you can switch at anytime.

freakynit: Is this due to how high-trust societies work, or is it something else?