Welcome To The Data Leak Lawyers Blog

“What Took So Long?” – Why did Yahoo wait two years to release information on the hacking scandal which affect half a billion users?

The Yahoo hack serves an important piece of advice: that millions of email accounts are at high risk of hacking all the time.

More than half a billion Yahoo user accounts were hacked in late 2014, with 8 million of them being here in the U.K – yet the figure was only released a couple of weeks ago.

So why did it take so long for the world to find out about the Yahoo email hack?
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“Big Brother Style Surveillance” – Yahoo allegedly handing over emails to U.S. Intelligence Officials

In the midst of ongoing cyber hacks that have seen information from millions of accounts from all sorts of services leaked online, Yahoo are alleged to have conceded to U.S. Intelligence Agency’s demands to search through customers’ email accounts for information.

This claim comes from the scandal that erupted last year, when Yahoo was found to be in breach of data protection rights when 500 million user accounts were illegally accessed. If found to be true, it is argued that Yahoo could be in serious breach of data protection rights, and may consequently face big penalties.
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“Be Careful Who You Trust” – Hackers may not be the only threat to our personal data, but organisations may be too!

When you pass your personal details to someone you trust, you would expect them to keep them safe. You would expect the same with an organisation who have a professional obligation to do whatever it takes to protect their customers’ details as well. Or you would hope…

But as most people are already aware, this is not always the case.
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“Security Breach that Cost TalkTalk £400k” – The major telecom company fined for the lack of security protection of customer accounts

Can you put a figure on stolen data? You can in terms of fines and compensation payouts.

Major U.K. telecom company TalkTalk has been fined £400,000 for the cyber-attack which happened in October last year. Up to 4 million customer details were thought to have been accessed, but it was later confirmed that around 157,000 accounts were directly accessed in the breach.
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“Paperless NHS with a Data Protection Risk” – Plans to bring the NHS into the ‘digital age’ could mean data protection risks for all NHS patients

It’s all well and good to go paperless and save money; but hasn’t this all been said and attempted before?

The NHS want to be innovators in the ‘digital age’ – and rightly so. Earlier this year, Health Secretary Jeremy Hunt promised to save the U.K. £4.4 billion with an investment plan to make the health service more efficient by going paperless. But, as Hunt pushes for a paperless health service, concerns are still brewing amongst the data protection camp.

And it’s a real concern with the health sector still the biggest perpetrators of data breaches and leaks.
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“The state who funds hackers” – Rumours of hackers who were sponsored by the state to hack Yahoo accounts

More than half a billion Yahoo user accounts were hacked in 2014. The hack is the latest of the recent big hacking scandals, like Last.fm in March 2012, dating websites Ashley Madison and Beautiful People, and a whole host of others.

However, the popular email server’s hack is thought to be the ‘largest internet theft on record’ (source). The personal data that was hacked included the names, email addresses, telephone numbers, dates of births, and passwords of affected users. What is more concerning is the suggestion of a “state-sponsored actor” being behind the cyber theft. Intelligent agencies across the globe are investigating the matter.
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Webcam flaws allow people to peer into other people’s lives!

We all know our daily lives are being monitored in this day and age, it’s something we have come to accept. CCTV is on just about every corner, especially in busy cities and town centres.

Then we have internet security cameras in offices and homes as well nowadays, but many of these are unprotected and may be vulnerable to hackers. A bit of knowledge could allow a person to hack in to the stream of a webcam and watch the unsuspecting victims when we’re at our most private and vulnerable…
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“Password protected… or are we?” – 43 million passwords in Last.fm hacking scandal

The hack of the music streaming platform, Last.fm, reportedly happened in March 2012, but it has taken a few years to uncover its true extent.

Earlier this month, an investigation found that a staggering figure of 43,570,999 user accounts had fallen victim to the hacking; a huge number.

In terms of how this stacks up with other hacks, it’s certainly up there with the volumes of people affected.
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Wrongful access to medical records

Our medical records are private and often very sensitive. Only those who we allow should access our medical records, and there should always be a good and justifiable reason to do so.

Despite this rather obvious sentiment, wrongful or needless access, or use of, medical records remains a problem that we have had to help people claim for. It can sometimes be people we know who have access to our records and access them for wrongful means, or it could be someone accessing records to change them, or to use information from them for financial gain.

It happens, and we have helped people who have had to claim when their records have been unduly accessed.
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Can we trust The Cloud?

A huge amount of world data is stored in “the cloud.”

Cloud computing is where data and applications are remotely stored rather than being stored on your own premises. This can save on IT costs and speed up operations, but it does raise the question as to whether it is safe or not.

More public cloud platforms are offered by the likes of Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure, and with so much information being stored in the cloud, can we trust that it is always safe?
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