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We specialise in representing victims for data breach compensation claims.
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Reports have recently emerged detailing the events of the Fat Face data breach, following the company’s decision to send out an email to affected customers. Victims were reportedly told to keep the information about the incident private.
The data breach itself is understood to have occurred in January, but it was not until the end of March that customers learned of the exposure of their information. Investigations by Fat Face has established that some systems were reportedly subjected to unauthorised access, affecting both customer and employee data. It has also been alleged that Fat Face paid a ransom to a cybercrime gang, though neither the company nor the ICO, the data protection regulator, appear to have confirmed this claim.
Those who have had their private information exposed in the Fat Face data breach may be able to recover compensation for the harm caused. Everyone has a right to adequate data protection. If companies fail in this duty, they can be liable to issue pay-outs to those affected.
The recent Birmingham City Council data breach has caused the exposure of private residents’ information, allegedly including details relating to vulnerable children (although this has reportedly been disputed).
As is the case in many council data breaches, the incident appears to have occurred as a result of human error, when staff mistakenly uploaded private information to a public access website. According to the council, the data was swiftly taken down, but the time for which it was uploaded may have been long enough to make the information accessible to unauthorised third parties.
In cases such as this, it may appear that little harm has been done, but all data breach incidents can be capable of causing significant distress for the victims. We trust local authorities like Birmingham City Council to safeguard our data. When they fail in this duty, they can be liable to compensate the victims for the harm caused.
As a firm of data breach claims solicitors, we are steadfast in our determination to help data breach victims to achieve justice for the untold distress and loss they have suffered. The Data Breach Lawyers is often at the forefront of new, evolving areas of data protection law, aiming to make sure no one who has their legal rights breached is left behind.
Developing our expertise over a number of years, our knowledge of this niche area of law is what allows us to be such staunch defenders of our clients’ legal rights. Unfortunately, many businesses and organisations continue to fail to protect personal data, but we know how to apply our skills and experience to make sure that they are held to account.
From the 56 Dean Street Clinic breach, to the huge group action against British Airways, our data breach experience spans several years. Read on to find out more about our ground-breaking work in this area of law.
SITA, an IT systems provider for much of the aviation industry, recently encountered a cyberattack described as “highly sophisticated”, which provoked a leak of passenger data from its servers at the end of February. The SITA data breach was monumental in scale, affecting hundreds of thousands of customers across several notable airlines.
Affected airlines included those under the Star Alliance group, such as Lufthansa and Singapore Airlines. It also included British Airways, which is currently the subject of our group action following two seismic data breaches in 2018.
The travel industry has long been targeted by cybercriminals. Examples include the Marriott data breach and the easyJet data breach, so it is unsurprising that hackers have sought to steal further information by attacking a company that serves so much of the global aviation industry. The breach is not believed to have exposed any highly sensitive data, but it must act as a wake-up call to airlines and other travel companies. The sector must now look to protect data from an incoming wave of sophisticated cyberattacks.
Email and phone scams continue to become more pervasive and varied as cybercrime grows, and one of the latest forms involves scammers claiming to work for Virgin Media.
The telecoms company has issued a warning in response to the reports of the fraudulent communication. Virgin Media suffered a notable data breach last year, and we are currently taking on claimants in a group action against the company. However, there is no evidence that these scammers are linked to the data breach, but there is a good reason as to why we need to look at how the two could, even if in theory, be linked.
Personal data is a valuable commodity to fraudsters, and there is a lot of money to be made by the theft and resale of private information. With a few simple contact details, scammers may be able to manipulate unsuspecting victims into handing over further personal data. This has happened before with data breaches and scammers have targeted victims, even passing themselves off as the breached company by exploiting exposed information. This is why it is important to talk about these issues in the context of a breach.
Our information is being increasingly shared for commercial purposes to businesses who use it to provide us with goods and services. However, local government bodies also process and store huge amounts of our personal data. Their need to monitor and manage the local community means that councils often require access to highly sensitive information. In the event of a local authority data leak, the consequences can be severe.
The important duties that they owe to residents do not appear to prevent local authorities from breaching data protection regulations. It is not acceptable that branches of government should neglect the law of the central government they are linked to, particularly in cases where their residents are exposed to significant data security risks.
We have represented clients in many local authority data leaks compensation claims. Anyone affected by a data breach such as this can contact us for free, no-obligation advice about No Win, No Fee representation.
Not long into the new academic year, the Northumbria University cyberattack shook the campus IT systems in early September 2020, forcing those at the top to close the campus and postpone scheduled exams.
It remains unclear whether any long-lasting damage was caused by the attack. In our experience as data breach lawyers, we have seen large-scale attacks such as this endanger or expose significant quantities of personal information.
Northumbria is not the first university to have experienced such an attack, a fact that highlights the particular vulnerability of higher education institutions to such malicious cybercrime. In university cyberattacks, employees and students can be adversely affected by the exposure of their personal data, for which they are often able to make a compensation claim. If it emerges that Northumbria University failed to protect personal data, we may be able to help anyone affected.
Although we may imagine many data breaches to occur as a result of external threats from hackers and cybercriminals, unfortunately, many arise within the affected organisations themselves. In fact, the mistakes of employees often account for failures in data protection, and human error council data breaches feature significantly among these accidental events.
The automation and regularity provided by computer systems and databases should allow little room for error in this day and age. Unfortunately, outdated operations and procedures that many companies still employ means that some mistakes slip through. The ignorance of what constitutes as good data protection practices can worsen the issues further.
If you have been a victim of negligence regarding data protection, you may be entitled to claim compensation for the damage that has been caused. Human error is not a viable excuse for data protection failures, so organisations must be held accountable for the broader data protection problems which these errors indicate.
As criminals become increasingly adept at accessing and using private data for their own gain, data breaches are becoming increasingly risky for the victims. If criminals abuse your exposed data to commit fraud, you might be able to claim compensation for identity theft.
Identity theft is one of the most significant risks of data breaches, as criminals can use even the smallest amounts of personal data to form a picture of a person’s identity. Whether they experience the effects of identity theft or not, the exposure to such risks can be extremely distressing for data breach victims.
As a leading firm of data breach lawyers, we aim to support any victims who have been made vulnerable to this devastating crime, many of whom may be eligible to claim compensation.
In March 2020, Virgin Media announced a shocking revelation about (mainly) customer data being exposed, and the Virgin Media data group action was launched as a result.
The telecoms giant admitted that the personal information of 900,000 customers had been exposed in a large-scale incident. The leak resulted in swathes of people’s information being potentially vulnerable to significant data security risks. As a result, we were compelled into action, and the legal case for justice is in full swing.
We are taking on more and more claims all the time in our fight for justice, and we wish to alert any affected victims that you can still be entitled to join if Virgin Media has notified you of your involvement in the data breach. Please be aware that there will likely be a court-imposed cut-off data for joining the action, so we recommend that you sign up to launch your claim as soon as possible.
At the end of December 2020, it was revealed that the Transform Hospital Group had been targeted by a devastating cyberattack.
The attack, which took the form of a ransomware hack, resulted in the theft of customer data from the plastic surgery chain, and the hackers behind the attack have since been threatening to publish the information online.
The hackers are understood to have made it known that they have 900 gigabytes of ‘before and after’ pictures in their possession, which they are threatening to publish if a ransom is not paid. Understandably, many of the victims are extremely concerned that their private data can now be exposed in this way. The Data Breach Lawyers have already taken on affected clients, and we encourage further victims to come forward for advice on their potential claim.
At The Data Breach Lawyers, we often represent victims for hospital data breach claims, so we are familiar with the devastating effects of hospital data breaches on the victims.
The data held by hospitals and other healthcare organisations includes some of the most sensitive personal information we will ever disclose to a third-party organisation. It must be properly protected to ensure that it is not misused or exposed.
The toll that medical data exposure can take on a victim can be huge, causing their everyday life to be marred by the worrying knowledge that their information could be being seen or misused by people we do not want to have access to it. We believe that each and every victim has a right to claim compensation for this untold distress, and that is why we represent eligible victims for claims on a No Win, No Fee basis.
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