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UK charities fined for misusing donors’ private information

11 UK charities have been fined for breaching data protection laws.

11 of the UK’s top charities have been fined for misusing their donors’ (aka individuals who donate) personal information. The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) have issued fines to the charities for alleged misconduct and breaching the Data Protection act.
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Three’s latest data breach

Three’s recent data breaches have caused a rippling effect for many customers.

The newest of the breaches caused some customers to be without texting and telephone functions on 22^nd April 2017, and also led to some texts going to totally random people rather than the intended recipients.

We have already taken cases on where personal text messages ended up in the inbox of someone totally random, and social media was filled with complaining customers asking for explanations.
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March 2017 saw a 1.5 million spike in lost or stolen medical records

Protenus, a company who protect patient privacy in the U.S., compiles a monthly report on data breaches called the Protenus Breach Barometer (PBR) using data provided by DataBreaches.net. It analyses all breaches reported to the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) in the U.S or to the media in 2017.

Looking at breaches that compromised healthcare records for the past few months in 2017, January and February seemed relatively quiet with 388,000 and 200,000 patient records respectively. However, when compared to the massive spike of 1,519,521 compromised patient records in March, it makes the previous figures look insignificant.
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Police officers have “unprecedented access” to millions of records

The Police Federation’s head of misconduct has revealed that a large number of the police force are “persistently” committing data breaches.

Fears have arisen that the police force are using technologies like the Police National Computer (PNC) and the Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) “for non-work related reasons”, according to the Police Federation.

And it’s happening all the time.
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Data breaches don’t come cheap… £120 million to be exact…

Numerous security experts have noted that data breaches at the Financial Times Stock Exchange’s (FTSE) 100 firms have cost approximately £120 million in market value.

£120 million isn’t really loose change that organisations and firms should disregard; it should be a wake-up call!

According to the Breach Level Index, almost 1.4 billion data records were lost or stolen in 2016. The statistics showed an 86% increase from the previous year. The Breach Level Index notes that:

“…more and more organisations are accepting the fact that, despite their best efforts, security breaches are unavoidable.”

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“Is the ethical handling of data the new moral responsibility for organisations? Could it help organisations gain any competitive advantage?”

The ethical handling of data has always been the aim of data protection watchdogs and officials. Companies and organisations have the responsibility to handle data securely under the Data Protection Act (DPA), but there is a growing term of ‘ethically handling data’.

And this kind of data handling can be seen to  make a difference.
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1,200 hotel chains worldwide affected by malware data breach

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) originally believed that 12 of their properties were compromised from the data breach, but it now transpires that approximately 1,200 IHG hotels are affected.

On the 19^th April 2017, IHG released new information in regards to the data breach. The information shows that the cyber-attack’s consequences were far worse than originally thought.

The data breach led to the theft of hotel guests credit card information.
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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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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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