Security News
More than half of data protection fines issued by the Information Commissioner's Office over the last two years, totalling more than £5m, have not been paid. The SMS Works pointed out that fines to home improvements companies appear to be least likely to be paid, with £1.6m in fines issued to these firms resulting in just £280,000 being repaid to date.
The dodgy use of personal data by rogue organisations in fraud and scams continues to be the biggest data protection bugbear for people in the UK, according to research from the Information Commissioners Office. What's more, organisations with a poor record on keeping people's data safe or not using it properly - such as those who pepper the public with unwanted marketing calls - are likely to find themselves scratched off people's Xmas card list.
The UK's data watchdog has issued £480,000 in financial penalties to four businesses that illegally made 2.4 million marketing calls to members of the public registered with the Telephone Preference Services. In the case of Chameleon Marketing, it made 617,323 direct marketing calls to people registered with TPS between 17 March and 2 July 2019.
Key to the criminals' success was Ticketmaster's decision to deploy a Javascript-powered chatbot on its website payment pages, giving criminals an easy way in by compromising the third party's JS - something the ICO held against Ticketmaster in its decision to award the fine. Ticketmaster 'fessed up to world+dog in June that year, and the final damage has now been revealed by the Information Commissioner's Office: 9.4m people's data was "Potentially affected" of which 1.5m were in the UK; 66,000 credit cards were compromised and had to be replaced; and Ticketmaster itself doesn't know how many people were affected between 25 May and 23 June 2018.
The UK's ruling Conservative Party has been using personal data in a way that spots an individual's likely county of origin, ethnic origin and religion based on their first and last name. According to an ICO report, the Tory party purchased so-called "Estimated onomastic data" and appended it to the records of 10 million voters.
Texts were received by unsuspecting members of the public between 29 February and 30 April, said the UK Information Commissioner's Office. The texts promoted Zoono-branded hand cleaning products that purported to be "Effective against coronavirus," said the ICO. Reg readers will remember that silly members of the public bulk-bought certain products, including toilet paper and hand sanitisers as the spread of the potentially deadly virus made its way across Europe.
The Miami-based cryptocurrency firm Centra Tech was built on fairy dust and paid celebrity hoo-ha, but co-founder Robert Joseph Farkas is going to be doing real time in a real prison for the $25 million initial coin offering rip-off. Centra Tech's founders included Farkas, who held different roles, such as chief marketing officer and chief operating officer.
Dixons Retail is facing a £500,000 penalty from the Information Commissioner's Office after a hacker installed malware that infected thousands of point of sale tills and scooped up 5.6 million payment card details. The ICO told us that in addition to the aforementioned personal financial data, Dixons had initially found that roughly 10 million non-financial records had also been pilfered from the retailer's internal servers and exfiltrated.
Businessman gets 18 months for bogus cryptocoin sales A 39 year-old man from New York has been ordered to spend the next 18 months in prison after being convicted of cryptocurrency-based securities fraud.…
Commissioner Elizabeth Denham Also Calls for Creating a 'Code of Practice'Elizabeth Denham, the U.K.'s chief privacy watchdog, is urging police to go slow when it comes to using live facial...