NEWS & UPDATES

The Community Health Plan of Washington (CHPW) – provider of health insurance in Washington – issued a press release on the 21^st of December concerning a data breach that may have affected up to 400,000 current and former members of the organisation.

This is yet another large data leak involving a healthcare sector – usually the biggest culprits in terms of data leaks, which is made worse by the sensitive nature of the data that can be breached.
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Back in the days where data breaches and hacks were a new phenomenon, ‘air-gapping’ was a term which meant that it was nearly impossible for computers to be breached.

Air-gapping is a security measure that isolates a computer away from a network. By doing so, the computer stands alone. The security method was thought to be 100 per cent effective as it allows data contained within the computer to be safe from hacking.

In the growing age of data leaks and hacks, is this the only way we can truly protect ourselves?
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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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The Information Commissioners Office (ICO) took action when hundreds of complaints poured in over spam text messages. The ICO, the regulatory body for Data Protection here in the UK, investigated the matter and found that two companies were responsible for millions of unwanted text messages being sent out to hundreds of thousands of people.

Silver City Tech Ltd and Oracle Insurance Brokers Ltd were responsible for using an affiliate service to spam people with annoying messages.
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The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) recently fined a Historical Society £500 for a data breach.

The monetary penalty was imposed on a Historical Society after a laptop, containing details of people who had donated or loaned artefacts to the society, was stolen among other things. This happened whilst an employee was working on a laptop from home.
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Yahoo seems to have ‘put their foot in it’ following revelations about the massive data breaches.

In a recent company’s filing with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC), it revealed that many employees knew of the hack since 2014 and that the data breach had been a ‘recent investigation’ when the company announced the news on September 22.
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Tesco Bank could be fined millions of pounds following its data breach that affected 40,000 customer accounts, with 20,000 of them actually having money taken from their accounts.

This is awful – and in an age where data breaches and cyber attacks are on the rise, people want to be assured that their data and their finances are safe; but that’s getting harder as it feels as though these big data breaches are happening all the time?
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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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