Welcome To The Data Leak Lawyers Blog

Company uses public electronic communications service to make unsolicited calls

Between the 1st June 2015 and 31st December 2015, Change and Save Limited reportedly used a public electronic communications service in order to make unwanted calls for marketing purposes. Change and Save claimed they were contacting people about a life style survey, but this transpired to be false.

By making these calls, Change and Save Limited breached the Privacy and Electronic Communications Regulations 2003.

Over 200 people had complained to both the Telephone Referencing Service and to the director of the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO).
read more

By Author

Should CEOs be held directly accountable for data breaches?

With recent data hacks being so huge, like the TalkTalk hack, social media giants MySpace and dating site hacks such as Beautiful People, more needs to be done to help prevent online attacks.

There has now been a call for more responsibility to be put on company CEOs to make them more accountable when dealing with a data breach. This has been a recommendation by the Culture, Media and Sport Committee, who carried out a report in the wake of the TalkTalk data hack.
read more

By Author

Confidentially and the NHS – Your Rights

All members of the NHS are under a duty to keep patient information confidential. This is crucial for patients as they may otherwise be put off seeking medical advice if they believed their personal information would not remain confidential.

Guidelines have been provided by the General Medical Council and the British Medical Association that medical staff must follow to ensure that patient’s information is kept confidential.
read more

By Author

Pokemon Go – an almost potential lure for cyber attacks?

The Pokemon Go phenomenon that allows players to find and catch their favourite Pokemon out in the real world is taking over countries across the globe.

Pokemon Go is a free app on IOS and Android devices that allows players (depending on time and location) to track, find, and capture different Pokemon. The app works by using your phones GPS and clock so that you are able to locate Pokemon based on your location in real time.

The game allows players to live the fantasy of being able to experience what it would actually be like in the world of Pokemon. But experts are warning that it could leave people open to easy cyber attacks. So should we be concerned?
read more

By Author

Can the police be trusted to handle our data securely?

Privacy rights campaigners, Big Brother Watch, have produced a damning insight in to the extent of data breaches committed by the police in the UK.

According to the report, 10 data breaches are committed every week, with some 2,315 being committed between June 2011 and December 2015.

In the wake of government calls for increasing powers for authorities to access private and personal information, the worry about data safety in the hands of the very people responsible for continual breaches is a cause for concern.
read more

By Author

TalkTalk Customers targeted by scammers and fraudsters; but what are TalkTalk doing about it?

The 2015 TalkTalk hack resulted in the details for 156,959 customers being accessed. Of these, 15,656 bank account numbers and sort codes were accessed.

Off the back of this, fraudsters have been targeting TalkTalk customers, and we can only assume they are doing it off the back of the information that has been hacked. We’re acting for a number of people who have been called by fraudsters pretending to be TalkTalk and scamming them out of money.

But TalkTalk seem awfully quiet on the very serious issue of their customers being targeted by clever fraudsters from what we have seen…
read more

By Author

Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly amongst those who cover their laptop webcam and mic with tape

Social media giant and Facebook owner Mark Zuckerberg is reportedly amongst those who cover their webcams with tape over fears of cyber snooping.

We recently blogged about the statistic that one in three of us cover our webcams in fear that they could be hacked or accessed to snoop on what we’re doing. In a photo shown on the BBC, Mark Zuckerberg celebrates Instagram reaching its five hundred million monthly milestone, and those with a keen eye have spotted the Mac in the background that appears to have tape over the camera.
read more

By Author

Data Breaches and the panic they cause!

As soon as you hear of a data breach, most people get concerned; and rightly so.

Whether it’s the bank you use, a social networking site you have an account for, or a telecoms provider, it’s always a cause for concern to hear that information has been hacked or leaked from an organisation that you are associated with in some way.

But with huge breaches like the recent MySpace, Tumblr, and LinkedIn ones comes an element of panic that causes things to get lost in translation, and the result is other organisations getting wrongly dragged in to breaches.
read more

By Author

The main cause of data breaches? Human error…

The primary cause of data breaches nowadays is simple – human error.

As humans we’re susceptible to making mistakes. It’s what we do and it’s a part of life, and learning from mistakes to better ourselves is a responsibility we all share.

But time and time again data breaches – which are continual – are happening because of human mistakes that have happened before and CAN be prevented.

So why aren’t organisations doing more to tackle it?
read more

By Author

Has your Microsoft Outlook or Hotmail account been flooded with spam over the last few days?

You’re not alone!

When I woke up the other day and checked my Hotmail account to find I’d been flooded with a load of spam emails, I thought “oh great, some idiot has signed my account up to something” – but it turns out it’s not that at all.

Apparently Microsoft is having some issues with its email filters, and the result has been a tirade of spam mails that’s caused a great deal of annoyance for those affected.
read more

By Author