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,…
Category: Commentaries and Analyses
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…
A breach that crosses the line?
Over on Massachusetts Data Privacy Law Blog, John H. Lacey writes: The pinheads over at LulzSec have crossed a major line. They hacked into the Arizona Department of Public Safety and published the names, addresses and other personal information of police officers (including their wives’ names and email addresses). They also published a lot of privileged…
Ponemon study: Cyber attacks more frequent, severe
Tim Greene reports: Cyber attacks are becoming more frequent and severe, and the vast majority of businesses have suffered at least one data breach in the past year, a Ponemon Institute survey says. According to the survey, 77% of respondents say attacks have been more severe or more difficult to prevent over the past 12…
UK banks unaffected by European data breach crackdown
Karl Finders reports: A crackdown on businesses which will make it mandatory to report security breaches will have little impact on UK banks, according to the British Bankers Association (BBA). Speaking at the BBA’s Data Protection and Privacy Conference, Viviane Reding, vice-president of the European Commission, said new rules will be implemented in Europe forcing businesses to…