Local council data breach advice

The risks when it comes to a local council data breach event are incredibly high. One of the primary types of cases that we take forward involve local government authorities and agencies, so we can tell you from experience that they’re worryingly common.

There are many reasons as to why council data breach compensation claims are so common. There are a lot of doorways to data in the public sector, and there’s a wealth of information that’s being stored and processed by local governments. The nature of the information they store and process usually covers the whole spectrum: from personal, to financial, and to medical.

Victims of a council data breach can be entitled to compensation, and it’s important that victims if an incident understand their rights.

Why are local council data breach events so common?

There are a few reasons as to why the risk of a local council data breach event taking place are so common.

These can include:

• The wealth of the data that citizens must hand over to them. Councils need personal and financial information for council tax reasons, and many citizens may need to hand over personal and sensitive medical data as well;
• Management and security of data is often handled at a local level, and with constant funding constraints and pressures, cybersecurity and data protection aren’t always a priority;
• There remains a lack of education and awareness for some staff, and training isn’t as good as it ought to be in some areas.

The lack of education, awareness and training is a key factor that criminals can exploit. With human error still a number one cause for data breach incidents, it’s the employees of organisations who remain one of the weakest links in the data protection chain.

How data breaches can happen

To prove the point when it comes to the risks of local council data breach events, we can look at some incredibly worrying statistics and information that’s been floated around in recent times.

There has repeatedly been almost 100 million cyberattacks hitting local councils in the last few years. There’s also the fact that security professionals have managed to easily hack councils in the interests of identifying the flaws, and the ways they‘ve achieved this haven’t been technical at all.

It can come down to simple phishing attacks that staff have fallen for. It can be malicious software left on memory sticks that have then been used in council servers. It can even be simple cases of people impersonating others in order to dupe staff into handing over data they can access.

With so many organisations working with, and departments working for, local government, it’s not difficult to achieve these easy breaches.

Claiming compensation for a local council data breach

You can be entitled to make a claim for compensation as a victim of a local council data breach incident.

You can read more about council data breach compensation claims on our advice page here.

For tailored advice about what has happened to you, please don’t hesitate to contact the team for a free, no-obligation chat about your options.

Hackers putting monitoring implants in iPhones

Compensation claims for human error data breaches