Global – Cyber Law Watch

Facebook fined £500,000 over Cambridge Analytica scandal

Jul 13 2018

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has issued a notice of intent to levy a £500,000 fine against Facebook for breaches of the UK’s Data Protection Act 1998. The ICO found that Facebook failed to protect its users’ data and be transparent about how that data was being harvested. This failure, ICO said, did not enable users to understand how and why they may be targeted by a political party or campaign.

The fine comes as part of a larger investigation by ICO into misuse of data in political campaigns, and responds to the highly publicised allegations that Cambridge Analytica used data obtained from Facebook to target voters in the 2016 US presidential election.

Research reports say risks to smartphone security aren’t phoney

Jun 19 2018

By Rob Pulham, Warwick Andersen and Sarah Goegan

Beware! Your favourite apps may be putting your phone and data at risk. Reports from Allot and BitSight have examined rising threats to the security of our mobile devices.

Not so happy families: Online genealogy website suffers data breach

Jun 13 2018

By Cameron Abbott, Rob Pulham and Sarah Goegan

Online genealogy platform MyHeritage suffered a major data breach in which email addresses and hashed passwords of over 92 million users were leaked. The data breach occurred in October 2017, but was not discovered until 4 June 2018.

MyHeritage became aware of the breach after a security researcher found a file named “myheritage” on a private server. The file contained all the email addresses of MyHeritage users who signed up through to 26 October 2017, and their hashed passwords.

US Department of Homeland Security unveils five point strategy to combat cyber risk

May 18 2018

By Cameron Abbott and Sarah Goegan

This week, the US Department of Homeland Security (DHS) released its Cybersecurity Strategy. The five “pillar” strategy will be executed by the DHS over the next five years, and aims to improve national cybersecurity risk management.

Excel skills of English Council leads to the exposure of “hidden” personal information

May 02 2018

By Cameron Abbott and Keely O’Dowd

The Kensington and Chelsea London Borough Council (Council) was recently fined £120,000 (approximately AUD$217,920) by the UK Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) for the unauthorised processing of personal data belonging to 943 people who owned vacant properties in the Borough.

Mark Zuckerberg testifies: what you need to know

Apr 12 2018

By Cameron Abbott and Sarah Goegan

Mark Zuckerberg testified before the US Congress in two marathon sessions this week. He was quizzed on topics including Cambridge Analytica and data sharing, privacy law and social media regulation, and Facebook’s policies.

Was your Facebook data taken by Cambridge Analytica? Here’s how to find out

Apr 11 2018

By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace

Over the last few weeks we’ve been blogging about the data “sharing” scandal that has rocked Facebook, and has lead to a boycott of the popular social media site, and sent CEO Mark Zuckerberg to face the music on Capitol Hill.

In case you’d missed the story (which you can read about here, here and here), Facebook estimated 87 million people globally, including 300,000 Australians, had their data shared with Cambridge Analytica, a political consultancy firm used by US President Donald Trump in his 2016 election campaign.

Uber hack – don’t tell anyone!

Nov 23 2017

By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace

It’s been revealed that Uber’s database has been hacked, with the personal information of more than 57 million users and drivers worldwide compromised. That’s a big number, but we are becoming increasingly numb to this kind of revelation, with all the cyber-leaks now making the news. What was the more astounding aspect of this particular incident is the fact it has taken Uber over a year to reveal the security breach – with the attack taking place in October 2016. Read More

New Petya Ransomware Attacks Global Law Firm

Jun 27 2017

By Cameron Abbott and Edwin Tan

Just a month after the WannaCry ransomware infected devices around the globe, a new strain calling itself Petya has struck overnight. Petya looks and operates the same way as WannaCry, locking out users from their systems and demanding a ransom of US$300 in order to decrypt files stored on the device. To spread across devices, Petya utilises exactly the same vulnerability used in WannaCry, patched by Microsoft in March 2017.

Organisations in Europe have been the worst hit, with the ransomware slowly spreading to the United States, and to Australia this morning as organisations boot up their computers. The Prime Minister of Ukraine has called the attack on his country “unprecedented”, with the government’s computer network going down, and the state power distributor being disrupted.

A global law firm has also been hit by Petya, with its offices in the UK, Europe, the Middle East and the US all affected by the attack. This continues a worrying trend of law firms being breached as of late, potentially exposing thousands of clients to commercial and legal risk.

We cannot emphasise enough the importance of keeping all devices and systems patched and up-to-date. Unfortunately, it seems that organisations around the globe, even those professing to be experts in cybersecurity, are still unprepared to deal with cyber-attacks and mitigate their risks.

The UK National Cyber Security Center has released guidance to help both home users and organisations limit the impact of ransomware attacks. It can be read here.

Cyber-attacks: a problem in 2016, still a problem in 2017

Jan 11 2017

By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace

A survey of nearly 600 organisations across a variety of industries globally has revealed 98% of these organisations experienced some form of cyber-attack in 2016. (We are left wondering if the other 2% just didn’t notice?)

The survey, conducted by cyber-security company Radware, also found that many organisations are still not prepared to face the threat landscape including that 40% of organisations do not have an incident response plan in place.

Respondents indicated that ransom was the top motivation behind cyber-attacks (41%), followed by insider threats (27%), political hacktivism (26%) and competition (26%).

Radware’s Vice President of Security Solutions, Carl Herberger, says that money is the top motivator in today’s threat landscape. He says “attackers employ an ever-increasing number of tactics to steal valuable information, from ransom attacks that can lock up a company’s data, to DDoS attacks that act as a smoke screen for information theft, to direct brute force or injection attacks that grant direct access to internal data”.

Radware predicts that in 2017, we will see an increase in the use of IoT botnets, cyber ransom, telephony DoS, permanent denial of service for data centre and IoT operations, and public transport being held hostage.

Not the most positive outlook for 2017, but it would be a brave person to suggest they are wrong with those predictions.

Tag:Global