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A database containing the personal information of 27,000
customers of Barclays' Financial Planning Services unit has
been stolen and sold on to "rogue City traders",
according to a report by the Mail on Sunday. The client information
dates from 2008 and includes detailed financial information such as
earnings, savings and mortgages, as well as passport numbers,
hobbies and psychometric test results. According to a
whistle-blower, files could be sold for GBP 50 each. The bank is
investigating and has said it will contact affected customers as
soon as possible. The FCA and the ICO have also been notified.
UK companies lagging behind on cyber security
Research commissioned by BT, which surveyed 500 IT decision
makers in companies located in seven different countries, found
that only 17% of UK business leaders see cyber security as a
priority, whilst in the US the figure is 41%. US companies are also
better prepared to combat IT security threats. The vast majority of
US directors and senior decision makers are given cyber security
training, yet in the UK only 37% receive such support.
City of London police and UK banks in cyber prevention
partnership
The organisations have been working together in order to thwart
criminals' attempts to hack into bank accounts, with police
using anti-terrorist techniques to identify suspect bank accounts.
They then alert the banks as to which accounts should be closed.
Twenty thousand bank accounts thought to have been used to steal
funds have been identified since April 2013, which the British
Bankers' Association estimates to have prevented the theft of
GBP 173.9 million from customers.
ICO fines government department GBP 185,000
The Department of Justice for Northern Ireland was awarded the
monetary penalty after a filing cabinet containing the personal
information of victims of a terrorist incident was sold at auction.
The personal data lost included information on injuries suffered,
the amount of compensation awarded, and confidential ministerial
advice. The ICO investigation found that staff had been provided
with limited instructions on how to handle personal data
securely.
New Turkish internet privacy law sparks violent protests
The bill, which was passed last week, allows Turkey's
telecommunications authority to block websites which are deemed to
violate privacy or to be "insulting", without first
seeking a court order. Internet service providers will also be
forced to store information on web users' activities for two
years, and to supply this information to the authorities on request
and without notifying users. Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan
has said that the legislation will make the internet "more
safe and free". The bill has received widespread criticism,
including from the European Commission, which stated that the law
"needs to be revised in line with European
standards".
California Senate restricts collection of personal data
online
An amendment to the Song-Beverly Credit Card Act, SB 383, was
passed by the California Senate, extending application of the Act
to online credit card transactions involving electronic
downloadable content. Merchants will only be able to gather
personal information such as zip codes and addresses during online
transactions involving these products in certain, restricted
circumstances. In the 2013 case of Apple Inc v Superior
Court it had been found that the original Song-Beverly Act did
not apply to this type of online transaction. The position relating
to other types of online credit card transactions remains
unclear.
Japan bombarded by 12.8 billion cyber attacks in 2013
The country's National Institute of Information and
Communications Technology (NICT) said that the attacks included
phishing campaigns, DDoS (Distributed Denial of Service) attacks,
and hacktivism, and that the state and government-run organisations
were the most common targets. The number of hacks has more than
doubled since 2005 and most attacks are thought to come from China,
the US, Russia or Brazil.
A government-affiliated organisation is to run a two-year
experiment in Japan's Osaka Station. This will involve
monitoring the movements of people passing through by way of a
facial recognition system featuring 90 cameras, which will track
chosen individuals for a week. The project organisers aim to gain
more information about how the station is used and say that only
some characteristics of a person's face are collected. Critics
note the risk of a privacy infringement, and that "individuals
could be identified if the data is correlated with...social media
photos".
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