The Information Commissioner’s Office has released Q3 statistics on data protection incidents reported to their office. Not surprisingly, reports were up. Some of their key statistics: Central government sector reports rose by 178% from Q2 (from 9 to 25). Incidents involving a failure to redact data increased from 1 to 11. Education sector incidents rose by…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Education Department Toughens Tone on Cyber and Threatens to Pull Funding for Non-Compliance
Sara A. Arrow and Craig A. Newman Recently-issued guidance from the U.S. Department of Education (ED) threatens to “yank” Title IV funding for post-secondary institutions lacking appropriate data security safeguards. The guidance comes as the risk of educational data breaches has intensified, as we have previously reported. The stakes are even higher now that ED…
RoxSan Pharmacy Notifies Patients of Breach That Occurred in 2015
There are a number of unanswered questions about an incident disclosed by RoxSan Pharmacy today. See what you think, starting with their press release of today: As part of its commitment to patient privacy, RoxSan Pharmacy (“RoxSan”) notified 1,049 patients of a potential breach of unsecured personal patient protected health information. RoxSan is notifying affected…
AMP Global Clearing LLC fined for lax security
A monetary penalty resulted from a misconfigured backup uncovered by Chris Vickery, who was then with Kromtech Security. It was reported publicly in April, 2017 by a number of outlets, including The Daily Dot. This was one of those cases where a vendor’s mistake turned out to be costly. The Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC)…
Aperio Group client account data breached by successful phishing attack
On January 30, Aperio informed advisors of a data breach that occurred when two employees’ email accounts were compromised by successful phishing attacks that resulted in auto-forwarding email from those accounts to two external accounts. Aperio discovered the problem on January 11, 2018, and their investigation determined that all emails sent to those two accounts between…
Scottish National Party hit out after investigation reveals data security breaches in Whitehall
Kieran Andrews reports: Lost confidential papers, leaked email addresses and the release of sensitive personal information were just some of the 4000 “data security incidences” recorded by the UK Government recorded last year. Data uncovered by the SNP has revealed that in one case an assault victim’s new name and address was inadvertently sent to…