The Daily Parker

Politics, Weather, Photography, and the Dog

Possibly the worst self-inflicted data disclosure in history

It's hard to overstate how bad this is. Via Bruce Schneier, it turns out that the Swedish Transport Ministry outsourced its database hosting to IBM, which subcontracted the work to a Serbian company with ties to the Russian military. And what databases did Sweden wind up hosting in its "Cloud" facility in Serbia? All of them:

Part of what IBM contracted to was run, and which was run from Serbia, was the Swedish government’s secure intranet – the SGSI, the Secure Government Swedish Intranet. This network is in turn connected to the European Union’s STESTA, which is a European Union secure network. This is what the Swedish Transport Agency gave staff in Serbia administrative network accessto, and it is no conspiracy theory that Serbia is a close military ally with Russia. While it can’t be proven in this specific case that high-value military information in Serbia’s hands also comes into Russia’s hands, it’s one of those things that should just be assumed in the general case.

The net effect here is that the EU secure Intranet has been leaked to Russia by means of deliberate lawbreaking from high ranking Swedish government officials. Even if there are additional levels of encryption on STESTA, which there may or may not be, this has “should never happen” written all over it.

Sweden's own data, leaked through this outsourced administration, include:

  • The weight capacity of all roads and bridges (which is crucial for warfare, and says a lot about what roads are intended to be used as wartime airfields);
  • Names, photos, and home addresses of fighter pilots in the Air Force;
  • Names, photos, and home addresses of everybody and anybody in a police register, all of which are classified;
  • Names, photos, and home addresses of all operators in the military’s most secret units – equivalent to the SAS or SEAL teams;
  • Names, photos, and home addresses of everybody in a witness relocation program or who has been given protected identity for other reasons;
  • Type, model, weight, and any defects of any and all government and military vehicles, including their operator, which says a ton about the structure of military support units....

There isn't a desk in the world sturdy enough for the massive head impacts that the rest of the worlds' security forces are perpetrating on them right now.

Stunning.

Comments are closed