A man from Fermanagh has been arrested along with a Dutch national (both aged 22) for their part in running the illicit credential marketplace WeLeakInfo. A joint collaboration between law enforcement in the UK, Northern Ireland, Germany, the US and the Netherlands was kicked off in the summer of 2019, with the site alleged to have over 12 billion credentials for sale, from various nefarious sources.
It’s a scary time to be an internet user, with three huges troves of user data recently discovered to be exposed online; opening users up to phishing emails, spam and even credential stuffing attacks.
In a move that is likely to shock corporations in Europe and beyond, the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined British Airways (BA) just over £183 million, due to a 2018 data breach in which personal data belonging to 500,000 of its’ customers was compromised. The move marks the first large fine handed down to a company since the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) took effect in May of last year and, shockingly, was less than 50% of the maximum fine that the ICO could have set for BA.
Another day, another data breach, it seems. On Friday, Quora became aware of an incident involving an “unauthorised third party” accessing data from 100 million users of the Q&A platform, and yesterday it began to notify users in an attempt to contain the incident. Quora Tweeted late last night, “We have discovered that some user data was compromised by unauthorized access to our systems. We’ve taken steps to ensure that the situation is contained and are notifying affected users. Protecting your information is our top priority” and directed users to a blog post with further information.
Eir is back in hot water again with the Data Protection Commissioner after the company issued a statement stating that it had lost an unencrypted staff laptop containing the details of 37,000 Eir customers. Eir has said that the data contained names, email addresses and customer account number, but that no financial details were compromised in the breach.
