Cyber Law Watch – Page 36 – Insight on how cyber risk is being mitigated and managed across the globe

Is Uber’s Greyball pushing the boundaries of what is legally and ethically OK?

Mar 13 2017

Ridesharing service Uber has been using a self-developed program called Greyball in a bid to avoid regulatory scrutiny and other law enforcement activity.

As reported in The New York Times, the program uses various techniques to survey government officials when rolling out the service in new cities. This came after Uber’s services encountered legal issues (including cars being impounded and drivers fined) as it tried to operate in new locations, including in Melbourne, Australia. Read More

Australia’s new data breach notification laws: what they mean for you

Feb 15 2017

By Cameron Abbott, Rob Pulham and Allison Wallace

Further to our blog post yesterday, we’ve prepared a summary into the implications of the Privacy Amendment (Notifiable Data Breaches) Bill 2017 that has now been passed by both houses of Parliament. Read our article here.

Australian data breach notification law passes both houses of Parliament

Feb 14 2017

By Cameron Abbott and Rob Pulham

For those who have been following the progress of the Australian data breach notification laws, as of yesterday (13 February 2017) the bill has been passed by both houses of Parliament and now awaits royal assent.

Update: Mandatory Data Breach Notification Laws closer to being introduced

Feb 07 2017

By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace

As foreshadowed by the Attorney General’s Department last year, the Australian government is pushing ahead with its plan to introduce mandatory data breach notification laws, with Parliament today agreeing to a third reading of the Privacy Amendment (Notifiable Data Breaches) Bill 2016. You can find more about the proposed legislation here. We’ll keep you updated as the bill makes its way through parliament.

Baseball team pays a big price for hacking

Feb 07 2017

By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace

You may not have followed this but the America’s Major League Baseball (MLB) St Louis Cardinals had an employee who accessed the Astros’ system around 60 times over two years, gaining access with a password similar to that used by a Cardinals colleague who left the club to work for the Astros in 2011. (Also a little lesson there about password management one would think.)

Anyway Correa was last year fined nearly USD280,000, and sentenced to 46 months in Federal prison. Enough said. Read More

Juniper report predicts IoT botnets will be an unmanageable cyber-security issue

Jan 26 2017

By Cameron Abbott

Juniper’s Internet of Things for Security Providers: Opportunities, Strategies, & Market Leaders 2016-2021 cautions that the scale of connectivity related to consumer IoT will lead to unmanageable cybersecurity risk created by botnets in excess of 1 million units. The research found that botnets that disrupt internet services form part of the near-term threat landscape and will be used for more malicious purposes in the future. Botnets are expected to be used not only to disrupt services, but also to create a distraction in order to enable multi-pronged attacks. While the research calls on IoT manufacturers to implement security-by-design, it also found the market is wide open for challenger security vendors.

U.S. data breaches reached record high in 2016: Report

Jan 26 2017

By Cameron Abbott

According to a report highlighting findings from the Identity Theft Resource Center and CyberScout:

Data breaches in the U.S. reached an all-time high in 2016, with the number of breaches tracked reaching 1,093, a 40% increase from the year earlier
The financial services industry accounted for only 52 of the breaches, or 4.8%, making it the least hit of the five industries tracked. Business, healthcare, education and the government and military were hacked more than the financial services industry
For the eighth consecutive year, hacking, skimming and phishing were the main drivers of data breaches, representing 55.5% of all reported incidents. Many were due to CEO phishing in which sensitive data is exposed
While consumers and businesses are constantly warned to pay close attention to their email, breaches that used email and the internet as a way to hack people only accounted for 9.2% of all the hacks, while employee error was responsible for 8.7% of the hacks.

This isn’t the first data set to show that data breaches surged in 2016. According to Gemalto’s Breach Level Index, in the first six months of 2016, data breaches rose 15%, and the number of compromised data records jumped 31% compared to the previous six months. The findings also revealed that 64% of all data breaches involve identity and personal data theft.

India’s top court asks WhatsApp, Facebook to please explain over privacy policy

Jan 23 2017

By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace

A petition to challenge messenger service WhatsApp’s privacy policy in India is gaining momentum, with the Supreme Court this week issuing notices to WhatsApp, its owner Facebook, and the telecom regulator TRAI to respond to the court within two weeks.

The petitioners are incensed over WhatsApp’s changes to its privacy policy in September last year, which saw it begin sharing users information with Facebook, including their phone numbers. Those who didn’t agree with the new policy were given the option to “opt out” by deleting the app. This announcement came two years after WhatsApp was acquired by Facebook. Read More

Alarming number of Enterprise Cloud Services aren’t enterprise ready

Jan 20 2017

By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace

A new report has revealed 95% of cloud services used by enterprises aren’t enterprise ready.

The January 2017 Netskope Cloud Report reveals a staggering 82% don’t encrypt data at rest, 66 per cent don’t specify in their terms that the customer owns their own data, and 42% don’t allow administrators to enforce password controls.

Of malware found in cloud services, backdoors were the most common (43.2%), with others including adware (9.8%), Javascript malware (8.1%) and ransomware (7.4%).

The report also shows an increase in the use of cloud services – with an average of 1031 cloud services in use per enterprise, up from 977 in the previous quarter. The retail, restaurant and hospitality industry was the biggest user of cloud services (1193), followed by financial services, banking and insurance (1132).

Cookies, Directories, Advertising and Personal Data: New EU Rules on Privacy in Electronic Communications

Jan 20 2017

By Cameron Abbott and Allison Wallace

With the EU heading full throttle towards the implementation of new data protection regulations in May 2018, there has been a lot of buzz around the impact the regulations will have, not only on day-to-day life, but other existing regulations.

One of these regulations is the Directive 2002/58/EC aka the ePrivacy Directive, which has been urgently reviewed ahead of the data protection regulations being implemented.

Brussels partner Ignasi Guardans has detailed the review and its implications here.