A new government website for registering for COVID tests in Austria is already causing displeasure in the country at its launch. First of all, on the opening day of Wednesday, users were surprised to find that the website was testing Austria.at is exclusively in German, runs on Amazon infrastructure, and does not contain a warning despite Google cookies. Then the website turned out to have a data leak.
After initial denial, the operating company World Direct admitted on Thursday that “in about 800 cases personal data is incorrectly displayed to third parties” were. Probably means that correct data was erroneously displayed to third parties. World Direct is a subsidiary of the majority Mexican telecom group A1, headquartered in Vienna. The company took the website osterreich-testet.at has been offline for a while and now claims to have closed the security hole.
Second embarrassment in a week
In response to specific inquiries from burgers as to whether they were among the approximately 800 people affected, only a reference to general questions about the planned coronavirus mass tests is said to have come back. Meanwhile, numerous users on social networks are reporting various technical problems with the website. There is also criticism of the fact that there is no provision for cancelling agreed test dates.
The shortcomings around oesterreich-testet.at are the second online bombshell for the Austrian federal government. The website, which went online on Monday “department store austria”, which was supposed to be an alternative portal to Amazon, was also buried with ridicule and criticism.