Earth Times: Massive security breach suspected at Latvian tax office
Earth Times reports on a possible security breach concerning the privacy of tax data in Latvia:
The State Revenue Service (VID) in Latvia admitted Monday that its electronic security systems may have been breached and that millions of confidential documents could have been hacked. The Latvian television news programme De Facto said Sunday night that 120 gigabytes of data consisting of 7.4 million individual documents had been leaked from VID’s database as a result of a data “hole” in an electronic tax declaration system.
The incident represented the biggest data breach in Latvia’s history and included information on businesses, individuals and public figures, De Facto claimed, and said it could vouch for the accuracy of the leaked data, which it said included the programme makers’ tax codes and rates of pay. [...]
The hole appeared to have been created in the system intentionally by a senior figure within VID, claimed representatives of a hackers’ group calling themselves the Fourth Awakening People’s Army (4ATA), which De Fact [sic] said obtained the information over a three-month period. [...]
[Finance Minister Einars Repse] told reporters Monday that the data leak was “extremely serious” but had been plugged. He refused to comment on who he thought was responsible for the leak, saying law enforcement agencies would decide the matter after investigations were concluded.
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