Municipality of Eindhoven affected by data breach, BSN citizens briefly provided internal insight

The municipality of Eindhoven reports a data breach in which the citizen service numbers of almost all citizens of the municipality were visible for 'a few hours'. This concerns an internal data breach whereby the data could only be viewed by civil servants.

Those affected were initially not informed about the incident because the risk of possible misuse of the data was assessed as 'unlikely' , writes the Eindhovens Dagblad. However, a report has been made to the Dutch Data Protection Authority, which is mandatory in the event of major data leaks. The citizen service numbers of more than 211,000 citizens were involved in the data breach.

The Brabant municipality has been under increased supervision by the AP since last year. The watchdog is concerned about the way Eindhoven handles the personal data of citizens. In a report, the municipality writes that 266 data breaches were identified last year. In most cases, these are relatively minor incidents, such as incorrectly addressing mail or an e-mail. The municipality reported 28 cases to the AP.