Jess Ma reports:
Hong Kong’s privacy watchdog has served a warning letter to the Urban Renewal Authority (URA) over its failure to prevent a leak of the personal details of 199 tenants and owners stored on a cloud platform.
The Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data issued an investigation report on Thursday and ruled that the URA contravened data laws by omitting key functions in security checks and failing to detect that the data was open to public access.
“The organisations that use cloud computing and cloud service providers have a shared responsibility to safeguard data security in a cloud environment, including the security of the personal data stored on the cloud, and comply with the relevant requirements of the Privacy Ordinance,” Privacy Commissioner Ada Chung Lai-ling said.
Read more at South China Morning Post.
Comment: Leaks of data due to misconfigured cloud storage is all too common, and it’s great to see the Hong Kong’s privacy commissioner publicly warn entities about their responsibility to check the security of their cloud accounts. Entities that leak data due to misconfigured Amazon s3 buckets, MongoDB, Azure blobs, open directories, or unsecured Rsync backups need to be held accountable for the violations of people’s information privacy or other harms that may occur. Entities need to routinely and actively check on the security of their data when it is managed by vendors or other third parties.