NEWS & UPDATES

Data privacy is getting more and more important, but it seems as though governmental authorities are becoming more and more lax on the matter.

Last month we possibly saw the death of U.S. citizens’ privacy rights in America. Although we’re here in the UK, this is relevant to us, because we still share so many ideals with our American counterparts, and we work with them a lot.

More often than not, the big worldwide breaches are affecting us both, and worldwide privacy rights is something we should all be concerned about.
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Thousands of Twitter accounts were recently compromised following a hack.

The hack reportedly took hold of several high-profile accounts which led to cyber-attackers tweeting all sorts of strange propaganda messages. The high-profile Twitter accounts includes Forbes, European Parliament, Amnesty International, and the BBC’s North American service.
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The Massachusetts Office of Consumer Affairs and Business Regulation has introduced a web-based data breach notification archive.

The archive gives access to the public and media to allow greater transparency in data breaches, highlighting those that fail to notify their customers/users of a data breach.
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Anthem, one of the largest health insurers in the U.S., compromised the personal details of around 80 million of their members and employees. Anthem disclosed what is dubbed as “the largest data breach in healthcare history” back in 2015.

Now, it has been revealed to the public that a foreign government may have been behind the cyber-breach.
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A lot of data hacks and breaches hit the headlines last year. Some of them happened a few years ago and were only revealed in 2016.

Let’s take a look at some of the biggest ones to hit the news.
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The Community Health Plan of Washington (CHPW) – provider of health insurance in Washington – issued a press release on the 21^st of December concerning a data breach that may have affected up to 400,000 current and former members of the organisation.

This is yet another large data leak involving a healthcare sector – usually the biggest culprits in terms of data leaks, which is made worse by the sensitive nature of the data that can be breached.
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Back in the days where data breaches and hacks were a new phenomenon, ‘air-gapping’ was a term which meant that it was nearly impossible for computers to be breached.

Air-gapping is a security measure that isolates a computer away from a network. By doing so, the computer stands alone. The security method was thought to be 100 per cent effective as it allows data contained within the computer to be safe from hacking.

In the growing age of data leaks and hacks, is this the only way we can truly protect ourselves?
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In the past few decades, technology has come on leaps and bounds. You can drive cars without steering them, switch appliances off at home without being in the house, and even book GP appointments and view your medical records using a mobile portal!

But just because the technology is there, it doesn’t necessarily mean people trust it enough to use it.

A recent study was made to see just how much people trusted using health technology portals to process their medical data. Generally speaking, the study revealed that a huge majority of us are sceptical of such technology, mostly because we fear data breaches.
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Although the U.K. voted to leave the EU in June’s referendum, this doesn’t seem to have altered the government’s plan to adopt strict EU data protection laws; namely the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

This Regulation will come into force on the 25 May 2018 with the aim of helping organisations and companies to understand the legal framework in the EU. There are some similarities with the U.K.’s Data Protection Act (DPA), but the new GDPR seems to be more stringent.
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The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) took action when hundreds of complaints poured in over spam text messages. The ICO, the regulatory body for Data Protection here in the UK, investigated the matter and found that two companies were responsible for millions of unwanted text messages being sent out to hundreds of thousands of people.

Silver City Tech Ltd and Oracle Insurance Brokers Ltd were responsible for using an affiliate service to spam people with annoying messages.
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The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently fined a Historical Society £500 for a data breach.

The monetary penalty was imposed on a Historical Society after a laptop, containing details of people who had donated or loaned artefacts to the society, was stolen among other things. This happened whilst an employee was working on a laptop from home.
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Yahoo seems to have ‘put their foot in it’ following revelations about the massive data breaches.

In a recent company’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it revealed that many employees knew of the hack since 2014 and that the data breach had been a ‘recent investigation’ when the company announced the news on September 22.
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