Kaspersky Lab writes: Computer users in many countries are increasingly falling victim to so-called encryption malware – programs that encrypt important data on infected computers and then demand a ransom to decrypt it. In 2014, over 7 million attempts to carry out such attacks were made against Kaspersky Lab users alone. Kaspersky Lab experts have…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
Court’s Interpretation of Merchant Services Agreement Limits Retailer’s Liability to Card Brands for Data Breach
Gregory Bautista and Melissa Ventrone of Wilson Elser write: On January 15, 2015, the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Missouri ruled that fees, assessments and costs imposed by the credit card brands on Schnuck Markets, Inc. (Schnuck), a grocery chain estimated to have had 2.4 million customers’ credit and debit card information compromised by…
Over 100 data breaches voluntarily reported to OAIC in past year
Leon Spencer reports: The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) has revealed that it received more than 100 voluntary data breach notifications in the 12 months since changes to the country’s Privacy Act 1988 came into effect in March 2014. The OAIC said on Thursday that it had received 104 voluntary data breach notifications from the industry, 14,064 privacy…
Fear of data breaches leads 21% of patients to withhold information from physicians
Elizabeth Earl reports: The national attention on the risk of data breaches may be keeping patients from sharing information with physicians. A survey from Austin, Texas-based software advising firm Software Advice of 243 people found that 45 percent of respondents were moderately or very concerned about security breaches involving personal health information. Nearly a quarter,…
How Data-Breach Hype Undermines Your Security
Sue Marquette Paremba takes the media out to the wood shed for reporting on breaches in ways that repeat false claims of “sophisticated” attacks and that may leave us thinking that there’s nothing we can do to protect ourselves or better secure data we are responsible for: Some media outlets called last month’s data breach at health-insurance company…
A breach, a complaint and how the NZ Privacy Commissioner helped
From the job-well-done dept.: New Zealand’s Privacy Commissioner, John Edwards, writes: Late last year, one of my senior investigating officers came to me with a file she’d been working on for quite a while. She was convinced the facts supported a finding of an “interference with privacy”, that is, a breach of the privacy principles,…