In mid-November last year, the retail giant Target experienced a security breach where customers’ credit card information was stolen. At first, it was thought that 40 million users had been affected but by January 2014, those numbers skyrocketed to a stunning 100 million. What emerged was the story of hackers who had appeared as “the good guys” in order to harvest as much information as they could from Target’s network.
A security breach is defined as any unauthorized access or acquisition that compromises the security, confidentiality, integrity or availability of covered information, systems, and applications. Recent years have seen significant amounts of legislative activity related to state data breach notification laws. South Dakota and Alabama enacted new data breach notification laws in 2019, becoming the last of 50 U.S. states to enact such laws.
A US energy company, identified by some media sources as Duke Energy, recently received a $10 million fine from the North American Electric Reliability Corp. for repeated violations of critical infrastructure protection (CIP) reliability standards.
The likelihood that your organization will suffer a material data breach in the next 2 years is nearly 28%, and that’s higher than last year’s risk according to The Ponemon Institute’s 2018 Cost of a Data Breach Study: Global Overview. Counsel’s best strategy is to insist on a strong organizational plan to quickly and effectively respond to data breaches and, ultimately, prevent them in the future.
France’s national data protection authority (CNIL — Commission Nationale de l’informatique et des Libertés) ordered its first sanction under the EU’s General Data Protection Regulation, or as commonly called as the GDPR. In this sanction, the CNIL fined Google a whopping €50 million because of Google’s failure to comply with the GDPR provisions when a user sets up his new Android phone and follows the subsequent process.
Breaches aren’t easy to deal with, especially if you are of the opinion that companies are people too. Having seen, been part of, and lent a shoulder to many a breach, here are nine of the common ways companies respond to breaches.
Recent findings report that on average, 96 percent of systems across all industry segments have been breached. While you should absolutely update your information security system and protocols to provide the best protection you can for your data, you should also know how to spot a data breach. Unfortunately the odds of escaping one aren’t in your favor, but you can increase your chances of spotting a breach quickly and containing any damage.
67% of small and micro businesses have experienced a cyber attack, while 58% have experienced a data breach within the last 12 months, according to a study conducted by the Ponemon Institute. Cybersecurity has become one of the major questions that plague the 21st century, with numerous businesses reporting significant losses resulting from loss of private customer data, denial of service (DoS) attacks.
During the holiday season people logged on to make purchases through online retailers, like no other time of the year. While there was significant growth in many segments of society on a global scale in 2018, we also saw a significant increase in online retail breaches where personally identifiable information was compromised at an alarming rate.
Global hotel chain Marriott has revealed that it suffered a significant data breach with the data of 500 million customers possibly compromised by attackers. Marriott received an alert on September 8 from a security tool regarding an unauthorized attempt to access the Starwood guest reservation database. Upon inspection, the company discovered that there had been unauthorized access to the Starwood network since 2014.
