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The Lead Experts Limited fined £70,000.00 for 100,000 nuisance calls

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) issued The Lead Experts Limited (TLEL) a £70,000.00 fine for reportedly making 111,072 unwanted nuisance calls.

TLEL violated data protection principles and the Privacy and Electronic Correspondence Regulations (PECR) when it failed to obtain real and proper consent from the people they had bombarded with nuisance calls, asking if they wanted to reduce their energy bills.

Today, direct marketing is easier than ever. Making calls to tens of thousands of people is incredibly feasible, and it doesn’t cost a lot to do it.
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ICO issues True Telecom fine of £85,000.00 and an enforcement notice for nuisance calls

Based in Dartford, True Telecom Limited has been fined by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for illegally calling people to advertise their services.

The Telephone Preference Service (TPS) reported a number of complaints from individuals who received calls from True Telecom despite being signed up to TPS to specifically let organisations know not to contact them for direct marketing purposes. Organisations who call people to advertise their products and services must first receive consent before they do so.
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Cloud storage error compromises almost 50,000 records belonging to government and major company employees

Australia was recently hit by a huge data breach when a misconfiguration of a cloud storage system reportedly compromised some 50,000 employee records.

This is thought to be the second largest data breach in Australian history.

A number of employee records were compromised for several government departments, including 3,000 from the Department of Finance; 1,470 from the Australian Electoral Commission; and 300 from the National Disability Insurance Agency.
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Deloitte belittles data breach for affecting “very few” clients

Corporate finance firm Deloitte disclosed a data breach that compromised its internal emailing system, but apparently the breach only affected a “very few” clients.

Those “very few” clients may be not-so impressed with, what appears to be, the company’s attempts to shrug the data breach off as less-than serious just because a small minority of clients were affected.

The company ironically recently rolled out its Cyber Risk Services and even received applause for its growth in cyber intelligence. This kind of breach for a firm of this nature – much like the Equifax breach – is incredibly worrying.
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Governments demanding answers from Uber over recent data breach

Car-sharing company, Uber Technologies, are facing further questioning from governments as they demand answers over alleged violations of multiple laws and regulations stemming from the 2016 Uber data breach that saw a reported 57 million customers and drivers have their personal information exposed.

The failure to disclose the breach is not being accepted by some regulators and lawmakers. A number of lawsuits have been launched against the popular company with allegations of consumer fraud and deceptive business practices.
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Emergency services upgrade to tougher Samsung smartphones

The British government have struck a £210 million deal with South Korean technology giant, Samsung, to arm its emergency services with custom toughened smartphones.

Britain’s police, paramedics and fire crews will be supplied with Samsung smartphones to carry out their jobs more easily and efficiently. For £210 million, Samsung will provide the services with 250,000 smartphones on a three-year deal. These devices are said to be water-resistant and will be connected to 4G internet.
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More firms fear data breaches but don’t know how to deal with them…

With the number of high-profile data breaches growing, like the Yahoo and Equifax hacks as two examples, more and more businesses are aware that they’ll probably suffer one sooner or later.

However, even though they’re aware of the risks and the possibility of an imminent attack, a lot of businesses reportedly don’t know where to start in terms of data security and how to react when a breach does happen.

This is worrying…
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West Sussex County Council apologises for data breach in inviting business owners to cybersecurity event

West Sussex County Council has apologised to numerous business owners for an ironic data breach that occurred in the process of inviting them to a cybersecurity event.

Located in Chichester, the Council sent an invite to some 200 individuals’ email addresses but used the wrong ‘blind carbon copy’ option, revealing the recipients’ email addresses to each other.

It’s a common form of breach – one that has had grave consequences in other cases, like that of the 56 Dean Street Clinic we are helping people claim for when they revealed the personal details of patients using the clinic for HIV services.
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Sex toy company Lovense “secretly recorded intimate sessions” through its vibrators

Our Data Leak Team are already representing a large group of victims of the We-Vibe data breach scandal. The trend of sex toy data breaches is alarming.

Lovense has admitted that its mobile phone app has been secretly recording audio files while its vibrators were in use.

The company has blamed a “minor software bug” for the apparently unintentional recordings.

Several users reportedly made the horrifying discovery when they spotted unusual sound files stored on their phones. As you can imagine, this is a huge cause for concern and can amount to a misuse of private information.
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2017 has seen over 7 billion records breached!

Yes, that’s billion with a B…

With the eye-watering number of records breached, the amount of breach victims out there is staggering. On top of that, the 7 billion figure is not even for the entire year; just the first three quarters!

Security firm, Risk Based Security, released a study over 3,833 publicly-disclosed breaches and found that 78.5% of the total number of records exposed stem from only five individual breaches. Big data breaches can seriously harm our commerce, and this figure is yet another reminder about the importance of cybersecurity.
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