We focus on the latest news surrounding data breaches, leaks and hacks plus daily internet security articles.
There are suggestions that mobile phone data protection is lagging behind as a result of security immaturity and attitudes toward mobile safety.
The smartphone industry in particular has grown exponentially in recent years, and with more than half of the internet’s traffic thought to be on mobile devices, and with mobile apps springing up all the time, some experts are concerned at the lack of maturity mobile phone data protection has when compared to desktop protection.
Does security and attitudes need to change?
An NHS data breach hit 150,000 after an IT glitch failed to record the wishes of patients who had opted-out of their medical data being used for research and auditing.
We’ve already accepted a number of cases for patients who have been affected by the huge NHS data breach. We are taking forward claims for data breach compensation for anyone who has received notification that they have been affected by the breach.
With 150,000 patients affected by the issue, this is a huge breach with the potential for GDPR implications to be imposed.
The year of 2017 saw a monumental 2.7 BILLIION data records compromised around the world as a result of data breaches and data hacks, estimates say.
This overall estimated figure of data records compromised is terrifying, with the UK reportedly in second place (behind the US) when it comes to the league table of breaches around the world.
They really are happening all the time and all over the place, and figures suggest that numbers have almost doubled in the UK from 2016 to 2017.
Recent study findings suggest that healthcare cybersecurity is still a cause for concern, with the healthcare industry itself a prime target for cybercriminals.
Underfunding and a lack of understanding by bosses means there are still huge gaps and vulnerabilities when it comes to healthcare cybersecurity, putting countless people’s private and sensitive medical data at risk of leaks and hacks.
It’s a simple case of pace: the healthcare industry doesn’t appear to be able to keep up to speed with the pace of the cybercriminals who are targeting them.
European regulators have rightly ordered big changes after the monumental Yahoo data breach that was revealed in 2016, having taken place two years earlier.
Some 500 million Yahoo user accounts were hacked, including around 39m European users; the largest ever single data breach to affect Europe. Information hacked in the Yahoo data breach included names, email addresses, telephone numbers, birth dates and passwords.
European regulators have demanded big changes be made to prevent a future incident of this size and nature ever happening again.
Cybersecurity is not a priority for most businesses in the UK, results from recent research has indicated.
Despite us being in a time where the importance of cybersecurity has never been more prevalent, businesses are still not showing the respect to cybersecurity that it deserves. In fact, recent research suggested that just 10pc of UK businesses see cybersecurity as their biggest challenge to economic success, despite 2018 being the big year of the GDPR changes.
With the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) now having the power to fine data breach offenders up to £17m, how cybersecurity is not a priority is incredibly baffling.
The recent Booking.com WhatsApp and text fraud operation showed precisely what criminals can do with enough data at their disposal.
According to the media reports in the aftermath of the Booking.com WhatsApp and text issue, criminals were looking to reap hundreds of thousands of pounds in ill-gotten gains by duping people into thinking they were Booking.com by using personalised messages that were said to have looked genuine, and included personal data.
Some people reportedly fell for the scam and lost money as a result, and we understand that Booking.com has committed to compensating victims.
As remote working continues to grow in popularity, adding massive flexibility for organisations, mobile working data breach worries are not being properly addressed.
According to a recent study, almost all (95pc) of businesses still struggle to secure mobile working, leaving both employees and the organisation on the whole at risk of mobile working data breaches. The study also said that one-third of businesses have suffered a data breach or a data loss as a result of mobile working, with one-in-five suggesting that mobile workers themselves simply don’t care about security. This is particularly shocking.
The information gleaned from this study is hugely concerning.
As the technology and use of unmanned aerial vehicles continues to grow, drone jacking could be the next big data breach risk.
Drones are already used in a number of industries: engineers use them for surveillance; insurance companies reportedly use them for monitoring; and Amazon want to use them to deliver packages to the doorsteps of homes around the world.
Our concerns are simple: if organisations can’t even get data protection right on a systems and software level, how are they going to get it right when it comes to potentially dangerous drones?
The recent TSB data breach issue will lead to compensation claims after the bank promised that no customer will be left out of pocket.
The huge TSB data breach was caused when a system upgrade went horribly wrong, leaving countless TSB customers unable to use their banking facilities online for several weeks. The system failures also led to serious data breaches where customers were able to see the personal details of other customers, and some customers’ funds and transactions appeared and disappeared in the accounts of others.
TSB’s promise to those affected should mean successful compensation claims.
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