Travel-booking site Orbitz hit with major data breach
By Cameron Abbott and Sarah Goegan
Travel-booking site Orbitz confirmed that it has suffered a major data security breach, in which details of up to 880,000 credit cards were compromised.
Facebook’s privacy breach puts spotlight on Australian election campaigns
By Cameron Abbott and Georgia Mills
News of Facebook’s involvement in the United States’ elections is nothing new, especially with the ongoing Cambridge Analytica scandal, so it should come as little surprise that the social media giant has extended its reach into the Australian electoral sphere.
Facebook approached Australia’s major political parties during the 2016 Federal election offering a powerful data matching tool. This “advanced matching” tool would allow parties to match data they had collected about voters- including names, dates of birth, contact details, and postcodes- against similar information provided by users on their Facebook profiles. The combined data would allow parties to identify swinging voters and target them with tailored ads when they use Facebook.
Facebook ‘hack’: fake news or a serious breach of privacy?
By Cameron Abbott and Samantha Tyrrell
It has been alleged that Cambridge Analytica, a political data analytics firm specialising in psychological profiling, has tapped more than 50 million users’ Facebook profiles without their consent and subsequently used the data to assist Donald Trump’s 2016 electoral campaign.
Bug Bounty Programs – your company’s friend or foe?
By Cameron Abbott, Keely O’Dowd and Samantha Tyrrell
Bug Bounty Programs (BBPs) actively encourage hackers to explore a company’s systems and report back on any vulnerability they discover. Often, pre-determined financial incentives are offered to the “security researcher” in return for their findings. The attraction of this process is obvious; rather than suffering a cyber incident that could – and for many organisations has – cost millions of dollars and resulted in reputational damage, companies can instead make a comparatively small payment to ethical “white hat” hackers with the intention of pre-empting an incident.
The Sydney Declaration: ASEAN and Australia commit to cooperate on cybersecurity and digital trade issues
By Cameron Abbott and Keely O’Dowd
Over the weekend our closest neighbours agreed to greater cooperation on cyber security. The Member States of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), the Secretary-General of ASEAN and Australian leaders met in Sydney to strengthen the ASEAN-Australia relationship. The leaders discussed issues of regional importance.
“Hey Google, could you be used against me in court?”
By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace
Smart home devices like the Google Home and Amazon Echo were popular gifts this past Christmas – just like Fitbits have been the Christmases past.
But could these smart devices that we rely on to seek out and relay information to us, turn on our favourite music, or count our calories and steps, be used to produce evidence against us, if we were to commit a crime? Read More
De-identification of Data and Privacy
By Cameron Abbott, Keely O’Dowd, Giles Whittaker and Harry Crawford
As promised in a previous blog post, K&L Gates have performed an in-depth analysis of the risks of relying on de-identification of data to protect privacy, in the wake of researchers successfully re-identifying de-identified medical data that was released by the Australian Department of Health in 2016.
Read the article on the K&L Gates HUB here.
Cybercrime most costly to financial services
By Cameron Abbott and Keely O’Dowd
A study by Accenture and Ponemon Institute – Cost of Cyber Crime Study: Insights on the security investments that make a difference – found cyberattacks cost financial service firms more to address and contain than in any other industry. The rate of breaches in the industry has tripled in the past five years. On average, the cost of cybercrime for financial services companies globally has increased by more than 40% over the past three years, from $12.97 million per firm in 2014 to $18.28 million in 2017.
Hackers target cryptocurrency via Tesla’s public cloud: don’t mine our business – mind your own business!
By Cameron Abbott and Samantha Tyrrell
Not even Tesla is immune to digital security breaches according to a recent report published by RedLock. The cloud security firm discovered that intruders were able to access and exploit Tesla’s public cloud system to mine cryptocurrencies, a scheme – which due to its surge in popularity – is now better known as cryptojacking. A recent string of similar incidents has demonstrated that hackers are shifting their focus away from siphoning data to siphoning cloud resources instead.
Mandatory Data Breach Reporting in 60 seconds
The notifiable data breach scheme, as outlined in the Privacy Amendment (Notifiable Data Breaches) Act 2017 (Cth), commenced yesterday, 22 February. Under this new scheme, in the event an organisation experiences a data breach that is likely to result in serious harm to any individual, that organisation will be required to notify the Australian Information Commissioner and any affected individual(s) of the breach. This 60 second video will help you prepare your organisation for these changes.