hackers

The personal data of around 174 thousand Dutch Uber customers and drivers was stolen in a hack that hit the taxi company late last year, Uber announced on Tuesday. The hack was only reported last month, NU.nl reports.

According to Uber, the number of affected Dutch is only an estimate, because it is not always clear from which country users of the service are.

The Netherlands systems for energy supply are becoming increasingly complex, which also make them more vulnerable to hackers, the Netherlands environmental assessment agency PBL said in a report on digitization on Thursday. This increases the risk of power outages, ANP reports.

Even without a cyber attack, even a small problem can have major consequences in the complicated systems, the PBL warned. The agency calls on the government to intervene. According to the PBL, major power outages can disrupt society.

The police launched a special database on which citizens can check whether their email address or other login details have been hacked or stolen. The database contains the email addresses the police found during cybercrime investigations, RTL Nieuws reports.

You search the database by typing in your email address. If your email is on the database, the police will send you a message with tips on how to proceed. According to the police, this database is "another step to make the citizen more resistant to cybercrime."

The city of Rotterdam's data protection and information security is so poorly organized that Mayor Ahmed Aboutaleb may be in danger, the Rotterdam Court of Auditors concludes in a report that the Volkskrant managed to get hold of. The report states that the mayor is at "real risk of physical danger", the newspaper reports.

For example, attackers could relatively easily get access to Aboutaleb's secret agenda or email to get information on where to attack.

Turkish hacker groups targeted a large number of Dutch websites after the political fallout between the Netherlands and Turkey over the weekend. The NL Times website was also targeted.

NL Times was the victim of at least two DDoS attacks on Sunday and Monday, in an attempt to take the site offline, according to a Turkish-language Facebook group linked to cyber-attackers. In a DDoS attack, a large amount of traffic is sent to specific servers, causing them to crash.

Interior Minister Ronald Plasterk's decision to count the votes in the parliamentary elections by hand is unpractical, according to the Dutch association for local governments NVVB. Counting the ballots by hand is expensive, will take a long time and is unreliable, the NVVB said in a statement.

Most of the political parties in the Netherlands do not secure their websites properly, which means that they are vulnerable to hackers, ethical hacker Sijmen Ruwhof said to NRC. "PvdA, PVV, VVD, CDA and D66 for example have not installed certain security updates on their party websites for over a year, which makes them more vulnerable to hackers", Ruwhof said to the newspaper. 

The challenge of keeping the Netherlands digitally safe is increasingly growing, according to Onno Eichelsheim, director of Dutch military intelligence service MIVD. The MIVD is therefore urgently looking for the next generation of cyber specialists to keep hackers out, he said to newspaper Trouw on Tuesday.

According to Eichelsheim, the specialists he is looking for is hard to come by, as they first need more training. "In order to understand new threats, I for example need people who can build algorithms to filter large amounts of internet data", he said to the newspaper.

With the parliamentary elections coming up in March, and warnings from American security experts that the Netherlands may be targeted by Russian hackers, Dutch parliament is focused on fixing cyber defense issues and increasing cyber security.

More than half of the Dutch government's websites still use an insecure internet connection, according to research done by the Open State Foundation. Many don't use the so-called HTTPS standard, which means hackers can easily eavesdrop on the sites or redirect traffic through malicious software, ANP reports.

The Dutch government will soon make a proposal that would allow the police to exploit so-called zero-day vulnerabilities in software and not notify the developers about the weaknesses, the Telegraaf reports based on sources in The Hague.

This means that if the police manage to break into a suspect’s phone and computer through a vulnerability that the developer does not know about, the can leave that “back door” open. And they don’t have to tell the developer about it. This will allow the police to make use of the same vulnerability for longer.