Is Local Government being disproportionately targeted by the Information Commissioner? Jonathan Baines looks at the evidence. On 1 July 2011 the Information Commissioner (IC), Christopher Graham, issued a strongly-worded press release, which announced the publication of five undertakings he had required NHS Trusts to sign, following serious breaches of the Data Protection Act 1998 (DPA). In…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
140,000 children could be identity fraud victims
For most people, the thought of their children being victims of identity fraud is even more chilling than being a victim themselves. While children are less at risk for identity fraud than adults, when it happens it can be much more devastating because the fraudulent activity can go undetected for years, making it all that…
UK: Banks face more privacy complaints from customers than any other group
Gerri Peev: Banks have attracted more customer complaints than any other group over allegations of mishandling sensitive information, the privacy watchdog reveals today. Lenders routinely lost, released or wrongly recorded personal data, the Information Commissioner warned in his annual report which detailed 603 complaints. But the true scale of privacy and data breaches could be…
Or we’ll huff and we’ll puff and we’ll blow your house down? Businesses must open their doors to audits, says ICO
Businesses should be more willing to undergo data protection audits, the Information Commissioner, Christopher Graham, said today. The warning comes as figures published in the ICO’s annual report show that private companies reported the most data security breaches of any sector in 2010/11. A data security breach is an incident that results in the loss,…
Security May Be Broken, But All is Not Lost
Dennis Fisher writes: It’s been an ugly year so far for the security industry. In fact, if you’re looking at it objectively, almost nothing has gone right in the last six months. The long list of attacks this year–including RSA, Sony, Epsilon, Lockheed Martin, Citigroup and many others–coupled with the emergence of amorphous hacking groups like LulzSec and Anonymous on…
Human Errors Fuel Hacking as Test Shows Nothing Prevents Idiocy
Cliff Edwards, Olga Kharif and Michael Riley report: The U.S. Department of Homeland Security ran a test this year to see how hard it was for hackers to corrupt workers and gain access to computer systems. Not very, it turned out. Staff secretly dropped computer discs and USB thumb drives in the parking lots of…