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.

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.

Denmark comes from a long line of institutional trust: We say we do this, so we do it, so everyone else will naturally expect that.

Changing a whole societal mentality in the institutional level happens slower than the populace discovering the "naturally" occuring dysfuntionality of everyday life, because the System has never felt the need to ask: Does it work as intended? OR Why would anyone disrupt a functioning system?!

We are having to learn. I have no ideal how. In this instance, the CPR hack, it would be completely IDIOTIC to replace the system with a new propritory system, since the problem is trust in the system rather than informed understanding of the threats to any system.

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.

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.

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.

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).

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

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.

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.

[delayed]

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

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

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

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.

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?

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

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

It's easy to blame the individual users but any system (designed by incompetent people) that accepts such a password as valid deserves whatever compromise it gets.

Literally nothing will prevent this but software building codes and enforcement. That's why we have building codes. We let builders do whatever they wanted for decades and it ended in disaster, so we stopped letting safety be optional.

not ideal

Did they have MFA?

The question really becomes: why do so many organizations seem to know absolutely nothing about well-publicized and well-documented best practices? How does a government completely lack controls or oversight for basic competence?

For 1-2 years now strictly IT companies are on Copilot, non strictly IT companies on autopilot, and in neither case there are any pilots. Hopefully the default installation and configuration of everything will solve all your problems because there is nothing else.

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.

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 :)

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.

> 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]

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?

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

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

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"