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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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Are large teaching hospitals more likely to have data breaches?

A new study finds that teaching hospitals are more likely to suffer from data leaks.

In a new study published by the Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA), researchers found that larger health care providers and teaching hospitals are more likely to have data breaches. At the John Hopkins Carey Business School, Assistant Professor Ge Bai identified that around 1,800 data breaches were reported in the last 7 years, and he found that, the larger the hospital, the more data breaches occur.
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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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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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