Wealden Council data breach incident

There has been a Wealden Council data breach incident that is understood to have allowed a resident to access the private and personal information of other people.

Due to what appears to be an access error, some particularly personal and sensitive information has ended up exposed. The council has apologised for the incident but, for those affected, the damage may already have been done.

Your Lawyers, as leading Data Leak Lawyers, see these kinds of events all the time, and we are more than used to representing the victims for compensation cases.

About the Wealden Council data breach

It is understood that the Wealden Council data breach occurred at the start of November 2021 and involved someone being able to access the personal details of some of its residents. Details understood to have been potentially exposed included names and addresses, as well as information about payments that were due relating to rent statements, and court papers in some cases.

It has been reported that the person who accessed the information was also a resident and that they had been inadvertently granted access to data online for the council that they should not have been able to access. The information in question was being stored on a cloud-based system, and the council has issued an apology for the error.

Part of the statement that has been posted on the councils’ website reads as follows:

“On Wednesday 10 November we became aware that one of our residents had inadvertently been given access to council data online via a cloud based system.”

“We have so far found that personal data contained within a set of court documents, and that within rent statements from a small number of council tenants (including names, addresses and payment due amounts) was accessed by this individual.”

They also confirmed that the matter had been reported to the UK’s data watchdog, the Information Commissioner’s Office. If the ICO deems that the data breach was severe enough, they could issue financial penalties.

A common kind of event

Unfortunately, it was not a surprise when we learned about the Wealden Council data breach. These types of inadvertent access and data leak events can be quite common, especially with local authorities. A large number of individual compensation claims that we are pursuing for people we act for are council data breach compensation cases, and the impact on victims can often be substantial. This is because councils often store and processes a wealth of very personal and sensitive information, so if it is ever misused or exposed, it can have a huge effect.

This is why data breach compensation amounts and pay-outs in claims like this can be substantial. We have already recovered over £1m in data breach damages since 2014, and a lot of those settled cases involve local authorities. As a leading firm of data breach compensation lawyers, we see these kinds of events all the time, and there is help that we can offer.

What can be done about the data breach?

If you have been affected by an incident like the Wealden Council data breach, you could be entitled to pursue a claim for data breach compensation. For eligible clients, we can also represent people on a No Win, No Fee basis.

If you are eligible to claim, you could be entitled to recover damages for any distress caused by the loss of control of your personal information. Whether you can claim or not may come down to the nature of the event and how it has impacted you, but you can speak to our team here now for free, no-obligation advice.

Acorn Stairlifts cyberattack

Data breach exposes customer billing information