NEWS & UPDATES

The government has warned of the increased fines organisations face for breaching Data Protection rules from May 2018, which could see fines as high as £17m.

Utility firms, transport firms, the healthcare sector and infrastructure companies are being warned to develop more robust safeguards to defend themselves from data breaches and cyberattacks, or face the costly consequences.

With mandatory reporting and massive fines being implemented in the next few months, the warnings cannot fall on deaf ears.
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Giant online retailer Amazon has introduced its brand new service to stop thieves stealing your parcels from your doorstep: Amazon Key. Instead of leaving your parcel outside, Amazon wants to open your front door to drop off your parcel.

Does this sound like a good idea to you? Technology today can do almost anything, so surely something like this is just another step towards a brighter, more innovative future?

I don’t know about you, but it sounds rather risky to me…
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Vanquis Bank Limited reportedly instigated a campaign to promote and advertise its banking services by instructing a third party to send 870,749 spam text messages, and another 620,000 spam emails.

As recipients reportedly didn’t consent to receiving these types of messages, Vanquis were found in breach of the law and have been ordered to stop and pay a £75,000 fine.

Some 131 complaints about the texts were made to the 7726 spam reporting service.
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There is growing importance for organisations to protect against hacking. In light of a number of infamous hacks that have occurred in recent years, it’s clear that we’re all at risk of third-party actors hacking into our servers and systems.

We have seen millions of documents and files being hacked from a number of organisations worldwide. Malicious actors can get in with simple vulnerabilities, like an organisation’s failure to update their Outlook webmail system. One simple error like this could lead to the whole organisation’s data servers being accessed!
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In recent years, the healthcare industry has been a big target for cyber-hackers, and there have been some huge cases reported. The healthcare industry leads the way in terms of the highest number of breaches and leaks in the U.K. and in other countries too, and in one example we’ll take a look at here, a hospital suffered a medical data breach that reportedly affected some 30,000 patients.

A medical breach involving 30,000 patients is absolutely monumental!
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Xerpla Limited boasts of a range of services for companies who really want to get their business off the ground. The London-based firm say they provide innovative design, advertising, and web hosting and consultancy services for their customers.

However, they may be using the cheapest way to reach as many people as possible.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) received 14 complaints over emails sent from the firm, and therefore began investigating them. The ICO found that the firm was responsible for sending over 1,257,580 million spam emails to promote and advertise products and services on behalf of their customers.
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Cyberattacks and data breaches have soared in recent years, and the U.S. has suffered huge amounts of breaches that has also affected U.K. organisations and citizens too.

They’re a worry because they can identify weaknesses in a country similar to us in terms of technological reliance and development. In this article, we’ll take a quick look at seven of the biggest government data breaches from across the pond in the U.S.
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Amazon recently launched their Amazon Web Service (AWS) – a completely separate arm to their huge retail business. The ever-expanding company has been hugely successful, primarily by embracing the modern method of online retail.

The AWS is marketed at all businesses and organisations: large, small, and even start-ups. Its services include database storage, analytics and management services, and they pride themselves on providing ‘flexibility, scalability and reliability’. The seemingly impressive service has already attracted many high profile companies and organisations including British Gas; Just Eat; Channel 4 and Trainline.
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A “hacktivist” is a person (or group) who hack into systems for political reasons or with a “socially-motivated” interest. In terms of the latter, the idea for some is to raise awareness of weaknesses so they can be plugged.

Last year for example, the Hungarian Human Rights Foundation (HHRF) website was accessed by a “hacktivist”. The cyberhacker said that they were able to access 20,000 accounts including personal information; but it was not an act borne from malicious intent…
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It seems our anti-virus cybersecurity protection software may apparently be putting us at risk. This juxtaposition is reportedly shared by the British Government who will avoid using the Russian-made Kaspersky anti-virus software over national security concerns.

The software works by accessing a lot of information; scanning it all for malicious coding. It’s this access to large amounts of information that is apparently worrying the British government.
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The U.S. Supreme Court is to hear a second significant case on digital privacy. Although digital data privacy is something that is fast becoming a common issue of debate, there remains a struggle to distinguish what the boundaries are when it comes to owning it or using it.

In this case, the dispute is between technology-giant Microsoft and the U.S. federal government. In 2013, U.S. prosecutors in a drug trafficking investigation obtained a warrant to search a suspect’s emails. It took the warrant to Microsoft demanding access to emails, and they put up a fight to stop access to them.
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Cybersecurity consultancy firm Accenture reportedly held an incredible amount of sensitive customer data on four cloud servers that were not password-protected. There were some 137GB of data on Amazon’s cloud bucket that included decryption keys, and without a password, the account was essentially available for access by the public.

The unsecured servers were discovered by a security research firm, UpGuard, in mid-September. They found:

• Secret Application Programming Interfaces
• Authentication credentials
• Certificates
• Decryption keys
• Customer information

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