Shortly after the release of the communiqué from the most recent ministerial meetings of the ‘Five Countries’ security alliance — Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the UK and the US — at the end of July, we warned that the issue of the use of, and access to, encrypted services and technologies ‘remains front of mind for … Read more

Cyber-attacks are a continuous threat to both businesses and charities. From the Cyber Security Breaches Survey 2019 (available here as a PDF), we can see that fewer businesses are identifying breaches than in previous years, but the ones that are identifying breaches are typically experiencing more of them. Approximately 32% of businesses and 22% of … Read more

The National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC) and the Information Commission Office (ICO) have clarified their roles in relation to breaches of cyber security.  NCSC manages cyber incidents at a national level to prevent harm being caused to both victims and the UK overall. It helps manage the response at a governmental level and seeks to … Read more

Just one day after its notice of its intent to fine British Airways £183.39 million, the ICO has issued a further notice of intent to fine Marriott International £99.2 million for its own data breach; The systems of the Starwood hotel group were originally compromised in 2014, prior to the acquisition of Starwood by Marriott … Read more

At the end of March the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) published an outline of the proposed structure for its auditing framework for the use of personal data in an Artificial Intelligence (AI) context. Once finalised the framework has potential to help catalyse the use of this new emerging technology within the restrictions of data protection … Read more

The UK Government recently launched a Call for Views on its Initial National Cyber Security Skills Strategy. The closing date for stakeholder responses is 1 March 2019, with the final strategy document expected to be published late in 2019. Read more

The Mirai malware gained its infamy in October 2016 following its record breaking attack on systems operated by domain name system provider Dyn, using unsecured Internet of Things (“IoT“) enabled “smart” devices (such as CCTV recorders, webcams and routers). It resulted in the widely reported outage of Twitter, Netflix, Spotify and Airbnb, amongst others. Mirai … Read more

The Court of Appeal has today dismissed an appeal against the High Court’s decision that Morrisons was vicariously liable for its employee’s misuse of data, despite: (i) Morrisons having done as much as it reasonably could to prevent the misuse; and (ii) the employee’s intention being to cause reputational or financial damage to Morrisons itself: … Read more