NEWS & UPDATES

In the past few decades, technology has come on leaps and bounds. You can drive cars without steering them, switch appliances off at home without being in the house, and even book GP appointments and view your medical records using a mobile portal!

But just because the technology is there, it doesn’t necessarily mean people trust it enough to use it.

A recent study was made to see just how much people trusted using health technology portals to process their medical data. Generally speaking, the study revealed that a huge majority of us are sceptical of such technology, mostly because we fear data breaches.
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Although the U.K. voted to leave the EU in June’s referendum, this doesn’t seem to have altered the government’s plan to adopt strict EU data protection laws; namely the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR).

This Regulation will come into force on the 25 May 2018 with the aim of helping organisations and companies to understand the legal framework in the EU. There are some similarities with the U.K.’s Data Protection Act (DPA), but the new GDPR seems to be more stringent.
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Thank you to the saviours that are the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO)!

There has been a recent uproar when WhatsApp’s privacy terms and conditions changed to allow their parent company, Facebook, to access its users’ personal details, which included phone numbers.

The ICO has recently intervened in the Facebook-WhatsApp data sharing agreement and have managed to ‘pause’ the agreement for the time being.
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Making an analysis of domain names at the time of registration is thought to be an effective way in the early detection for potential cyber-attacks and spam messages in the future.

This was noticed by American professors and the International Computer Science Institute who created the system PREDATOR: Proactive Recognition and Elimination of Domain Abuse at Time-Of-Registration.
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Although many businesses and organisations should have in place a security team and a ‘data breach preparedness plan’, it is said that many do not review, update, or actually practice it.

I then ask: what’s the point of having such a plan?
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Reports suggest that ransomware attacks are rapidly rising across the globe.

It’s not your typical ‘newspaper-clipping ransom’ that attackers are deploying, but the hacking is sophisticated and aggressive, and often uses clever malicious software.

These ransomware attacks against businesses are reported to be four times higher than last year, and when businesses are locked out of their own systems, it’s often cheaper just to pay the ransom and get back up and running.

Time is money: cyber criminals are exploiting this extremely well…
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In the modern age of technology, personal data is being passed around like a hot plate. Some information can be very valuable – like the information of someone who has been the victim of a car crash, and is entitled to compensation; and entitled to have a legal representative who can recover fees.

Our firm is proud to have NEVER paid referral fees or money to claims management companies or insurers for work, even before they were banned in April 2013, and now the rules have changed and banned the payment of referral fees, a black market has developed in its place.
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Following the year of 2015, which was dubbed ‘the year of hack’ with companies like Yahoo and Sony falling victim to huge hacking scandals, Tom Ridge, the former secretary of the Department of Homeland Security, said that a cyber-attack can be “far more serious” than a physical attack.

It seems like an outlandish claim, but when so much information can be reaped from a hack – which could literally ruin a person’s life, in theory – is he, perhaps in some circumstances, right?
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In recent years, hacks and leaks have increased at an extraordinary rate. Although most data breaches still occur within the healthcare sector, the utilities sector remains one of the biggest culprits as well. The TalkTalk data hack last year is still fresh in our minds, and we’re assisting people making claims off the back of that particular hack.

Another one was the 2015 British Gas leak where the email addresses and passwords of 2,200 of its customers appeared online.
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An NHS Trust in Blackpool was fined £185,000 when confidential details of staff members were posted online. On top of the breach itself, The Trust also failed to take proper action on the data breach for almost a year.

The information that was posted online by The Trust included names, birth dates, and national insurance numbers, along with other information like sexual orientation, ethnicity, religious beliefs, and pay scales. The information that was posted was of 6,574 both past and present employees.
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A data sharing project called “care.data” was a scheme that allowed GP and hospital data to be stored and shared within the NHS, and possibly with third parties as well. It was supposed to launch in 2014 but has been heavily delayed due to privacy concerns.

Now, the project is being terminated all together, thanks to the Department of Health in England.

So, with all the NHS breaches and leaks – with medical breaches still being far ahead of the tables in terms of breaches by sector – is this a good thing? Have we just dodged a huge data breach bullet?
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We are acting for a number of patients who were affected by this leak – please contact us if you have yet to make a claim.

On the 1^st of September an NHS sexual health clinic in Soho made the mistake of sending out a newsletter to over 700 users of the clinic that had patient’s names and email addresses visible for all recipients

The majority of those whose identity was revealed in the email are HIV positive, as they were using a particular service known as Option E. The clinic services a small area of London, and people were able to identify other people they know from names and / or the email address.

The leak is one of the most significant in UK and NHS history.
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