March 2017 saw a 1.5 million spike in lost or stolen medical records

Protenus, a company who protect patient privacy in the U.S., compiles a monthly report on data breaches called the Protenus Breach Barometer (PBR) using data provided by DataBreaches.net. It analyses all breaches reported to the Department of Health and Human Services (HSS) in the U.S or to the media in 2017.

Looking at breaches that compromised healthcare records for the past few months in 2017, January and February seemed relatively quiet with 388,000 and 200,000 patient records respectively. However, when compared to the massive spike of 1,519,521 compromised patient records in March, it makes the previous figures look insignificant.
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“Is the ethical handling of data the new moral responsibility for organisations? Could it help organisations gain any competitive advantage?”

The ethical handling of data has always been the aim of data protection watchdogs and officials. Companies and organisations have the responsibility to handle data securely under the Data Protection Act (DPA), but there is a growing term of ‘ethically handling data’.

And this kind of data handling can be seen to  make a difference.
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1,200 hotel chains worldwide affected by malware data breach

InterContinental Hotels Group (IHG) originally believed that 12 of their properties were compromised from the data breach, but it now transpires that approximately 1,200 IHG hotels are affected.

On the 19^th April 2017, IHG released new information in regards to the data breach. The information shows that the cyber-attack’s consequences were far worse than originally thought.

The data breach led to the theft of hotel guests credit card information.
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Customers of “pay day loan firm” Wonga victims of serious data breach

UPDATE: PLEASE NOTE THAT WE ARE NO LONGER ABLE TO ACCEPT NEW CASES IN THIS MATTER.

For help and advice for other data breach cases and matters, please contact the team here now.

Around 270,000 customers of “pay day loan firm” Wonga have had their personal information accessed after hackers broke in to the loan company’s customer database.

The company said they’re looking into the incident and are “urgently investigating illegal and unauthorised access to the personal data of some of its customers in the UK and Poland”.

With data like bank details and other personal information accessed, customers may now be at serious risk of financial losses, as well as further breaches and serious distress.
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“SMEs reportedly not prepared for cyber-attacks” – More and more SMEs are subject to cyber-attacks and are worryingly not prepared for them

Amongst all the ‘high-profile’ data breaches like Yahoo and TalkTalk, there isn’t a lot of media coverage surrounding small-medium sized enterprises (SMEs) and the data breaches they’re guilty of.

However, SMEs should remain vigilant as there is a rise in cyber-hacks in recent years, with cyber-criminals targeting small businesses just as much as the larger ones.

The legislation affects us all, so no one can hide from it – no matter your size!
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Huge hack affects thousands of NHS staff

Thousands of NHS staff in Wales have had their private information stolen after hackers accessed their details through an IT contractor’s server.

The private information included:

• Full names;
• Dates of Birth;
• National Insurance Numbers;
• Radiation doses.

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The most worrying web leak of 2017: Cloudflare’s #CloudBleed

Google’s Project Zero team detected a huge data leak on Friday 24 February which may persuade you to change all your passwords.

According to Cloudflare’s incident report, a bug exposed private session keys and other sensitive data of 2 million sites on the Cloudflare network.

Once again – no one is safe!
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Millions of WhatsApp and Telegram users exposed to ransom hacks

WhatsApp and Telegram are the latest victims to third party data hacking which saw millions of users vulnerable to having their accounts taken over and held to ransom.

Hackers utilised a weakness in images being sent through the messaging apps to hide malware that could eventually take over accounts.

Once again – no one is safe!!!
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Hundreds of NHS patients may have suffered serious harm from 500,000 data breaches

Although we value and treasure our National Health Service – who for the most part do a wonderful job of looking after us – they are responsible for significant amounts of data breaches. In fact, they’re way ahead when compared to everyone else, and it’s a real issue because the information they secure for us is often very sensitive and personal.

Unfortunately, we have to report yet another serious data breach story involving the NHS.

It has been revealed that the NHS has lost more than 500,000 pieces of patient information between 2011 and 2016. This may have led to hundreds of NHS patients suffering serious harm as a result.
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Trio of data thieves have been prosecuted and fined over £400,000

A gang of three data thieves were charged and prosecuted by the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) earlier this year for unlawfully obtaining personal data at their employment, and then selling it onto claim management companies.

Andrew Minty, Jamie Leong and Michelle Craddock – all employees of Enterprise-Rent-A-Car – conspired to steal customer information so they could sell on the personal information to third party claims management companies. They sold the information on the basis that the claims management company would then use the personal data and information to make nuisance calls to the individuals.
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