The National Centre for Medical Information (NCZI) has filed a criminal complaint against an 'unknown' perpetrator with respect to a data leak, NCZI general director Pavol Capek reported at a press conference on Tuesday. Capek is convinced that the cyberattacks were related to the ongoing selection proceedings for the NCZI's top post.
At the same time, a Slovak IT security company of so-called ethical hackers, called Nethemba, maintains that the NCZI has once again failed to protect the personal data of millions of people. According to ethical hacker Pavol Lupták, Nethemba warned the NCZI beforehand of security flaws in their system, and granted the NCZI time to fix them in order to prevent the mass leak of data. "Instead of thanking us publicly, they're threatening us with a lawsuit," he claimed.
In Luptak's view, any IT-adept person could have found and exploited what he called a "trivial vulnerability". If it had been malicious hackers instead of ethical ones, they wouldn't have had any qualms about breaking the law and wouldn't have bothered to inform the NCZI about anything. Facing such potential backlash from the NCZI, Luptak believes that ethical hackers in future could lose any motivation to report similar shortcomings.
