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.
Late last year Uber was hacked and the personal data of 50 million customers and 7 million drivers were stolen. Whether any Dutch customers or drivers were among them, a spokesperson for Uber Nederland refused to say to RTL Nieuws. According to the spokesperson, the company is currently "in conversation with various authorities", and the Uber will not publish any more details about the hack until these talks are done.
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.
Hackers can easily break into Dutch solar panels, which could put the European power supply at risk, according to cyber security investigator Willem Westerhof of ITsec in the Volkskrant.
According to Westerhof, the SMA transformers in many Dutch solar panels are poorly protected and have a "wide range of vulnerabilities". Users aren't prompted to change the default password. The transformers are vulnerable to force attacks. And the devices are secured by one super password of the supplier. If a hacker gets hold of that password, many problems can be caused.
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."
Multiple nude photos of Dutch actress Carice van Houten leaked onto the internet, according to the Telegraaf and RTL Boulevard. She appears to be the latest hacking victim of the Fappening 2.0.
Rumors about nude photos of the 40-year-old actress became more and more persistent over the past week, though her lawyer could not say anything about it.
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.
A number of popular Dutch twitter accounts, including that of Amnesty International, Caro Emerald and Donald Duck, were hacked into and hijacked. The hijackers used the accounts to spread Turkish threats and anti-Dutch propaganda, RTL Nieuws reports.
The tweets called the Netherlands and Germany Nazi countries and included a link that takes you to a YouTube video showing a compilation of speeches by Turkish president Recep Tayyip Erdogan. The accompanying text warns not to test Turkey's patience.
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.
While the outcome of the Dutch parliamentary elections next week may not be of vital interest to Russia, Russian hackers are targeting the Netherlands as a warm up for the elections in Germany and France, Ronald Prins, co-founder of cyber security company Fox-IT, said to DW.com.
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.
The votes in the upcoming parliamentary elections in March will all be counted by hand only, to avoid any chance of hackers interfering with the outcome, Minister Ronald Plasterk of Home Affairs announced on Wednesday. This follows concerns about the security of software used by the Electoral Council and warnings that the Dutch election may be targeted by foreign parties.
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 software used at Dutch polling stations to send election results, is outdated and very vulnerable to hackers and there are not enough rules around where and where the software can be installed, according to security expert Sijmen Ruwhof, who investigated the software on behalf of RTL Nieuws. According to Ruwhof, "the average iPad is more secure than the Dutch voting system".
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.
Ransomware - a form of malware that takes your personal files and data "hostage" and only releases them once you've paid a sum of money - is getting more and more sophisticated, security expert Martin van Dantzig of Fox-IT warned in the Volkskrant. This last period has seen particularly rapid professionalization, he said.
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.
Russian hackers made use of a private Dutch server to attack the American Democratic Party, the Volkskrant reports based on documents from the United States' Department of homeland Security. The Dutch server in question belongs to Rejo Zenger, who wors for privacy organization Bits of Freedom.
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.
Defense company Thales deals with over 100 thousand cyber attacs a dy on various fronts ranging from computers on their network to employees' personal phones, CEO Gerben Edelijn said to BNR.
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.
Hackers attacked at least 250 Dutch online stores, through which cyber criminals were able to steal payment information from customers placing orders, according to an analysis by security screening Willem de Groot
Hackers managed to break into the municipality of Almelo's servers and steal some 20 gigabytes of data. The exact data stolen is unclear, though it is "almost certain" that personal information was among it
PvdA parliamentarians have questions for Minister Ard van der Steur of Security and Justice and Minister Ronald Plasterk of Home Affairs following a hack into the municipality of Ede's website which gave hackers access to personal data of 3,700 Ede residents. Primarily the parliamentarians want to know whether this type of digital security should not be in national hands
