5 devastating data breaches that made the world a little better

A data breach or data leak is an incident where unauthorized persons gain access to data. If the term is interpreted broadly, it also includes unwanted deletion of data, i.e. data loss.

In this article we use the term ‘data breach’ more broadly than, for example, on Wikipedia: it not only means ‘data breach’, but also serious failure in data collection. Because even such cases can have significant consequences – sometimes even positive ones.

Operation Medusa – when hackers are hacked by hackers

With their Snake malware, elite Russian hackers kept the world on edge for nearly two decades, spying on targets around the world with virtually no hindrance.

The secret service FSB was behind the powerful cyber espionage infrastructure, with the data being forwarded through a perfectly camouflaged network. The hackers were constantly developing the attack tools. You could use it to penetrate protected IT systems (Windows, Mac, Linux) and even steal top secret data “exfiltrate”.

The Swiss army and the now privatized arms company RUAG are among the many victims. The military special unit AAD10 was also directly hit. The identities of the members fell into the hands of the Russians. This brought covert operations abroad into question.

A central aspect of the operation to dismantle the Snake infrastructure was a species “vaccination”. The program developed by the FBI is named after the hero of the Medusa saga. It caused the Russian malware to overwrite itself on infected computers and disable it without causing any further damage.

It should be noted that the activities of the Russian hacking group Turla have been widely known since 2013. At that time, American whistleblower Edward Snowden leaked a secret presentation.

It says Snake is “designed by geniuses, implemented by idiots”. In fact, the attack infrastructure would not only have been used for cyber espionage in the narrow sense, but would also have served criminal purposes.

How the Corona data mess shook up Switzerland

Covid-19 ruthlessly exposed it: Switzerland’s health care system is one of the most expensive in the world, but it has serious data processing deficiencies.

Digitization has been oversleeping for decades. And so many medical practices and hospitals used fax machines when they had to report clinical findings from corona-infected people to the Federal Office of Public Health (BAG).

The above quote is not from the then Swiss Minister of Health, Federal Councilor Alain Berset, nor from the Federal Office of Public Health (FOPH). The striking sentences are from the man who took the initiative to solve the data debacle quickly and unbureaucratically.

His name is Andreas Amsler and he was employed at the time at the Statistical Office of the Canton of Zurich. As head of the Open Government Data department and coordination office, he made government data almost like a job and then started working with like-minded people from the data community to improve the processing of corona data.

In an NZZ interview, Amsler explained:

A second role model was the European Center for Disease Prevention. This agency of the European Union is responsible for the prevention and control of communicable diseases. And it provided the important information at an early stage about how many patients were in the intensive care units.

So it was possible, as Amsler modestly explains, that the Swiss data situation could be improved.

In fact, Covid-19 has given the Swiss population a huge tech boost. Now those responsible in the cantons and the federal government must prove that they have learned from the data breaches.

Federal Switzerland is not at a disadvantage compared to centralized countries when it comes to digitization, Amsler said in the newspaper interview last October:

And with that to a completely different data breach, which also made headlines during the corona pandemic and caused an international political tremor.

China’s crimes against humanity

In May 2022, journalistic revelations about the well-known persecution of the Uighurs by the Chinese state caused a sensation. Verified photos from inside the detention centers were shown for the first time and Beijing could not deny what was shown.

The leaked data came from an anonymous source, a hacker apparently able to break into Chinese security services computer systems and steal police files. This source did not set any conditions and there was no payment.

The Xinjiang Police Files are also a triumph of data journalism over a secretive criminal regime. In addition to classic criminal investigations, the journalists also used modern technology to check the authenticity of the leaked data.

How a struggling spyware vendor exposes government double standards

The NSO Group is a symbol of a billion-dollar industry that doesn’t shy away from anything. This refers to the developers and providers of commercial smartphone spyware. The most famous product is probably Pegasus. Malware that can also crack supposedly secure iPhones and turn them into perfect surveillance devices.

The beneficiaries are not only the shareholders, but above all the government clients who pay a lot of money to secretly spy on friends and enemies.

After numerous global scandals, the controversial Israeli company was said to be ceasing operations. But this spring it became clear that the NSO group continues to pose a threat to regime critics, dissidents, media people and all actors disliked by the rich and powerful. Independent security researchers from Citizen Lab, a Canadian research organization, have new Zero click exploits discovers. With the help of these attack tools, iPhones running iOS 15 and iOS 16 operating systems can be easily hacked over the internet.

Good news for human rights and civil rights activists, opposition members and other potential targets: the lockdown mode that Apple launched in the summer of 2022 is intended to protect iPhones against such attacks.

The even better news: More and more politicians are learning that the supposedly safe and practical surveillance tools pose a deadly threat to democracy and must be fought.

However, in April of this year, the NZZ published that another notorious spyware provider received support from the federal government and from a Ticino technical college. In other words, a lot still needs to change.

How a lost USB stick became a boomerang

The article has become much longer than I planned, sorry! 😌 Now we close the data leaks with a very special case.

It happened in 2012. A lost USB stick turned up in Greece. And this one should make some very rich and powerful people sweat. A file on the memory stick contained the names of more than 2,000 suspected tax evaders. They all had undeclared accounts in a Swiss private bank.

Spicy: The USB stick had been handed over to the Greek finance minister two years earlier – by the then French finance minister and current president of the European Central Bank, Christine Lagarde.

Then the stick, or explosive frame, disappeared into the labyrinth of the Athenian bureaucracy, only to reappear much later – albeit in a slightly different form.

The now-missing records concerned the accounts of a cousin of the nation’s top tax inspector, as well as her husband and the husband of another cousin.

The Excel spreadsheet, known as the “Lagarde list”, led to a real scandal in Greece. The then head of the tax investigation department claimed that he had not used the file because the information did not come from legal sources. The Greek press suspected that tax evasion should be covered up.

The case ended political careers and even claimed lives. A courageous journalist who eventually published the names was briefly imprisoned, but was soon acquitted by the court.

PS: The Lagarde list was just one “subset” of a much larger set of bank details, the so-called Falciani list, that a computer scientist in Geneva had stolen from his employer. This later became the Swissleaks.

And we learn from it:

Sources