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Exam Board, AQA, reportedly compromised 64,000 examiners’ personal details

A school examining board has recently fallen victim to a mass data breach, compromising approximately 64,000 current and former examiners’ personal information.

AQA’s online systems were reportedly hacked on the 21^st March 2017. These online systems stored examiners’ name, addresses, personal phone numbers, and passwords. The examining board were quick to stress that the attacked systems didn’t store any financial details or any personal data of the schools, pupils or exam material.
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Met Police potentially breaching 30,000 individuals’ data

The Metropolitan Police are being questioned for potentially breaching the personal data of approximately 30,000 firearm owners.

It transpires that the London Metropolitan Police have reportedly disclosed the names and addresses of 30,000 firearm and shotgun owners (around 5,000 rifle owners and 25,000 shotgun owners) to a direct mail marketing agency, named Yes Direct Mail, which is said to be as part of an advertising campaign.

In the absence of specific permissions, any handover of information can be construed as a breach of data law.
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Data of 100,000 U.S. Student loan applicants hacked

Regulators have identified that up to 100,000 student loan applicants could have had their personal information stolen by hackers.

This comes after a “data retrieval tool” that allowed applicants to upload their tax information to the Free Application for Federal Student Aid (FAFSA), which was hacked by criminals. John Koskinen, head Commissioner for the IRS, has been investigating the ways in which the breach could have happened.
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RinGo Parking App Potentially Leaks 2,000 Customers Details

It’s almost impossible to avoid everyday news of another company being added to the long list of data breach perpetrators and here’s another one…

Parking app “RinGo” is the latest company to suffer a breach. The app supposedly removes the hassle of paying for parking, making it quick and easy without the need to queue.

After the company updated their app, hundreds of customers reportedly saw other people’s details when they tried to log into the app.
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95,000 McDonald’s applicants personal information hacked

Food for thought: McDonald’s is the next big corporation to fall victim to a major cyber-attack.

A McDonald’s Canadian unit said that 95,000 job applications were compromised from a cyber-attack that took place on the 31^st March. It’s believed that the cyber-attackers retrieved information such as names, addresses, email addresses, phone numbers, and employment backgrounds from a careers website.

The users affected by the hack are said to be candidates who applied for jobs at one of Canadian branches between March 2014 and March 2017.
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Latest data breach affecting customers of mobile provider Three

Three are experiencing more technical issues and more backlash as customers are reporting another data breach.

Customers are reportedly left fuming as they discovered the data breach after they logged into their accounts to find names, addresses, phone numbers, and call histories of other customers rather than themselves. Three previously came under fire for failing to alert customers of the initial data breach which happened in November 2016; which sounds a little like déjà vu…
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Concerns over NHS plans to move all sensitive patient data up into the Cloud!

We have all heard of the online Cloud data storage; but pardon our old fashioned pessimism, but it sounds like a disaster waiting to happen!

It seems a far-fetched suggestion to trust all of your sensitive data to be stored in something that was named after floating wisps in the air that come and go depending on the weather. With all the data leak incidents and scandals erupting left, right and centre… we can’t be blamed for our scepticism when it comes to uploading personal information on the World Wide Web.

If it’s on the internet, surely hackers will always find their way in? So how is our sensitive medical date ever going to be safe when it’s all accessible online?
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26 million GP records may have been breached

Medical records contain a wealth of information on patients, and any leak or breach of medical information is a serious one.

Scarily, an investigation has been launched into the security of a computer system that holds 26 million patients’ records. The investigation, launched by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO), is looking at whether the computer system complies with the data protection act.

If it wasn’t, who knows how bad this breach could be?
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Parliament Scandal – data breach affects thousands of MPs’ employees

Of all people to accidentally publish personal details, you wouldn’t have thought it’d be an independent watchdog…

Following news reports form the BBC, the expenses watchdog has been left red-faced and has issued an apology for their disastrous error where approximately 3,000 MPs’ employees and their salaries were mistakenly published.

The Independent Parliamentary Standards Authority (IPSA) was created by Parliament in 2009 to independently oversee and regulate MPs’ business costs and expenses, and in this instance, they have found themselves at the centre of a scandal themselves.
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We-Vibe data surveillance breaches the Data Protection Act

We have been approached by a number of concerned individuals in the U.K. following the news that the company behind the “smart sex toy” We-Vibe is settling Group Action claims in the U.S. for collecting user data without proper consent.

We have now taken on a multitude of cases as we investigate the circumstances surrounding the collection of data without the consent of users here in the U.K., which we allege is a breach of the Data Protection Act.

The Canadian manufacturer of We-Vibe, Standard Innovation, was fined CAD $4 million (£2.4 million) after they were found to be collating and using their customers’ data without explicit consent.
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