A massive trove of Swedish citizens belonging to Swedish Transport Agency (STA)(Transportstyrelsen) was mistakenly uploaded onto an unprotected cloud server where it might have been leaked to anyone in the world.
According to a Swedish Newspaper, the breach took place in September 2015 when STA handed its IT services which included database management to IBM sub-contractors in Eastern Europe (Romania, Serbia and Czech Rep.) who had access to the data without any security clearance.
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In March 2016, the Swedish Secret Service found out that the cloud server where those data were uploaded lay unprotected.
An investigation into the case was later carried out and it was found that the data available on the server contained personal information such as address, names, vehicle details and pictures of almost every citizen in the country. Details of government military vehicles, driver's license records of military and police officials and also personal details of military members in the secret units and whole lot of other data were part of the breach.
After revelation of the leak, the STA's boss Maria Agren resigned from office and was later charged to court. Surprisingly, the court asked her to pay just half of her monthly salary 70,000 Swedish Krona (about $8,500) as punishment for the breach.
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"All of this was just outside the proper agencies, but outside the European Union, in the hands of people who had absolutely no security clearance. All of this data can be expected to have been permanently exposed," said Rick Falkvinge who is the founder of The Pirate Party.
"Unlike breaches where malicious users sasaran vulnerable systems, this leak of personally identifiable information was the result of carelessness."
