Hackers are suspected of having cracked the Danish government’s national database containing the personal information of nearly nine million people, potentially exposing them to fraud or identity theft.
Copenhagen’s Ministry of Research, Education and Digitalisation said on Monday that the Central Register of Persons (CPR), the national civil registration database containing personal information for millions of citizens, has been compromised.
In Denmark, all legal residents have a unique 10-digit civil registration number, used to access public services, healthcare, banking, and taxes, and to store information on each citizen, including name, date of birth, address, marital status, citizenship, religious affiliation, and parentage.
The government said on Monday that unidentified people used a Danish business’s access to the system to wrongfully obtain the CPR numbers, names, and addresses of around 8.8 million people, the public Danish Broadcasting Corporation (DR) reported.
In a briefing on Monday, government minister Christina Egelund said that it was too early to tell whether it was a cyber attack or whether foreign state actors were involved in the leak.
“We are not ruling out any clues in the ongoing investigation. Nor that it may have an international character,” she said.
Egelund added that the government will review the entire CPR system and implement “adjustments and transformations” to re-establish security.
