The Prime Minister Wants to Complicate Access to Income Data of Officials and Politicians in Latvia — North Korean Intelligence May Be Interested

According to the politician, freely accessible declarations of officials create risks for national security, as some of the data contained in them is sensitive. In Kulbergs' assessment, combined with other publicly available government databases, "this data becomes an effective profiling tool." Kulbergs notes that currently, information from officials' declarations in the State Revenue Service system is available for free viewing without user identification. "In the age of artificial intelligence, the collection, structuring, and merging of vast amounts of data takes not months, but minutes. This means that such data can be systematically collected and regularly updated by the intelligence services of Russia, Belarus, North Korea, or other states as well," Kulbergs believes. According to the politician, if stolen data from the Road Traffic Safety Directorate (CSDD) is combined with publicly available declarations and other databases, profiles of police officers, military personnel, border guards, security service employees, government officials, and their families can be created. "Declarations should remain accessible to the public, but I see no reason for them to be copied en masse and anonymously," Kulbergs stated. As a possible solution, he suggested keeping the information publicly available but providing access to it after authentication, for example, using a profile from Latvija.gov.lv. Kulbergs reported that one of the main tasks now is the obligation of the CSDD to notify each affected person and enterprise, specifying which exact data was stolen. All institutions responsible for critical infrastructure and sensitive data have also been tasked with conducting full-scale hacking simulations, or penetration tests. At the same time, it has been instructed to assess the possibility of limiting the freely accessible tool for checking vehicle registration numbers in the e-CSDD system, as well as to determine how quickly government systems can abandon the use of personal codes as usernames, transitioning to a more secure identification solution. As reported by **bb.lv**, as a result of the cyberattack that affected the CSDD on the night of August 8, personal data of 1.2 million people and data of approximately 200,000 legal entities were obtained. Data on payments made to the directorate over the past 18 years was stolen. Both the CSDD council and the company's board announced their resignation on Wednesday, August 19.