Fico accuses the government of falsifying vaccination data. He did not notice the long – mediated weakness in eHranice – Živé.sk

Robert Fico has accused the state of falsifying vaccination data. It is based on only one fact – that someone filled it in during the holidays eHorder form intended for persons coming from abroad to Slovakia and stated in it that he had been vaccinated.

The chairman of Smer-SD was to be informed by the National Center for Health Information (NCZI) that it was a “hacker attack”. When claiming, it is forgotten that the eHranica form is not specially secured and it is not necessary to have special IT skills to fake it in a false way.

In September, he was invited to present a document

According to Fico, the unknown person had his birth number and other “highly personal data”. Nevertheless, he did not file a criminal complaint. “What’s the point?” He asked.

In a statement, Fico also objected when he blamed the “lousy government” without evidence and said he would not speculate “who did it and how.”

“Someone, it had to be in cooperation with state authorities, entered the information into the system that Róbert Fico crossed the border on July 31, 2021 and entered the territory of Slovakia, that he filled in the eHranica form, and that he wrote there that he was fully vaccinated so that he did not have to quarantine, “says the former prime minister.

He added that despite information from the NCZI, hygienists asked him in early September to provide proof of vaccination.

A well-known weakness, even a layman would abuse it

However, it should be noted that since the beginning of the launch, eHranica has not used any more advanced security mechanism – to fill in the form, it is still sufficient to know the person’s birth number. No verification codes from email or SMS are entered.

Nethemba security company in addition, it warned in Augustthat the online service for the verification of insurance relations of the Office for the Supervision of Health Care (ÚDZS) made it possible to enter the name of a citizen and to test the correct combination of digits from the birth number indefinitely. After the problem was reported, the institution removed the option to enter a name.

Even without using the ÚDZS service, anyone could guess the correct data of Robert Fico and register it in eHranice, as his date of birth is known to the public and only the remaining digits “behind the slash” remain to be guessed. The condition is that the whole number must be divisible by the number 11. There are less than a thousand possible combinations for one date of birth.

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The system also rewrote the contact details

Recall that the eHranica system contained another more serious error in the background – it rewrote a person’s contact details if they did not match those used by the citizen in the past, for example in testing.

Fico stated today that he does not have a mobile phone and uses the e-mail addresses of his colleagues, not his own e-mail. “I have my reasons for that,” he reasoned. It was different in the past. Back in 2020, Fica captured a camera in the Radio Slovakia studio with a phone whose value was around 15,000 euros, she pointed out Facebook page Infosecurity.sk.

Already in the summer, Nethemba confirmed that it had found the birth numbers of several prominent politicians to demonstrate the mistake. He does not comment on Fico’s current words and alleged hacker attack.

“Due to the fact that we complied with the conditions of responsible disclosure of vulnerabilities, we did not disclose any information obtained during the detection of errors, nor do we plan to disclose it,” the company told Živé.sk.

Back in August, NCZI announced a new environment with completely changed login logic into “all systems for citizens”, which should be universal. So far, no specific news has been announced.

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Unrelated records

Fico still described the events today as “obviously a political attack”. “I wonder if all the numbers and statistics are not falsified in this way,” he indicated unfairly.

“What if there are tens of thousands of cases where the vaccination rate is increasing by falsifying documents. This cannot be ruled out at all for these people, but that it cannot be ruled out at all, and may my case be a memento of the perversion of this governing coalition, “said the chairman of one of the opposition parties.

The individual records are not related to each other, as they are separate systems and statistics on administered vaccines are not generated from eHranice.

eHranica does not match the data registered with the database of vaccinated and hygienists laboriously view the records and address specific persons. The editors have the experience that they asked for a confirmation of the test in June, while the result of this test also went through the NCZI IT system.

In addition, Slovakia is one of the countries with the lowest vaccination rates in the European Union. Thus, falsifying negative data would not even give an elementary logical meaning. Specifically, in Slovakia it was 41.6 percent last week, while in Portugal it was up to 85.9 percent.

Filip Hanker collaborated on the article