Another blow has been struck to US companies wishing to do business in the European Union, as the ‘Privacy Shield’ regulation which allowed EU citizen data to be transferred to and processed in the US has been deemed invalid by the European Court of Justice. Privacy Shield was itself designed to replace an older data transfer mechanic/regulation called ‘Safe Harbor’, which also met the wrath of European lawmakers back in 2015.
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.
A strain of ransomware titled SamSam has earned its handlers over 5.1 million euros to date, according to estimates, since it first began hitting enterprises in 2015. Security firm Sophos has released the data in a report, after tracking the Bitcoin addresses found on SamSam ransom notes and sample files.
It has come to light that a recent breach disclosed by Ticketmaster UK may be much larger than initially reported, with not just the company’s UK site, but also their sites for Ireland, New Zealand, Australia, Turkey and even the US found to contain digital card-skimming code. Similar to the recent breach at Harvey Norman, this incident was caused by cyber criminals compromising a third-party service provider, not the site itself directly, leading security experts to believe many more websites may be at risk or have been compromised. This is part of a concerning new trend whereby cyber criminals are targeting third-party providers, who may deal with hundreds of websites, rather than attacking a website individually, exponentially increasing the damage inflicted.
The flow of data between the United States and the EU may be at risk as tensions are rising around Privacy Shield. If you haven’t been living under a rock for the last two years, you will likely have heard of the GDPR – the EU data protection regulation that now fiercely protects EU citizen data, whether in the hands of a non-EU or EU-based organisation. You may have wondered, then, how companies in places like the US are still able to legally hold and process EU data without falling foul of the GDPR, and the answer is Privacy Shield. Privacy Shield is a framework that allows companies on both sides of the Atlantic to transfer data while complying with the GDPR. However, this may all soon change, with Members of the European Parliament calling for Privacy Shield to be brought up to scratch or invalidated.
