Shane Chambers No Comments

BA Ends up With £20 Million Fine for 2018 Data Breach

British Airways now hold the dubious honour of receiving the highest data protection fine that the UK has ever seen, after the Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) handed down a record-breaking £20 million fine. The fine could have been much heftier, however, as the ICO fine was originally slated at well over £150 million. BA negotiated to have to fine reduced on the back of several factors, including how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected their industry and business and the conduction of a more thorough review on how the 2018 incident occurred from a technical standpoint.

The £20 million BA fine is currently the highest ever recieved in the UK for a data breach.
Read more
Shane Chambers No Comments

WordPress Sites Seeing Increased Cyber Attacks Thanks to Plugin Vulnerability

The team behind Wordfence, a popular security plugin for WordPress, have reported seeing a large increase in cyber attacks aimed at WordPress-based websites over the last few weeks. This is believed to be due to a vulnerability in another WordPress plugin, File Manager, which has over 700,000 active installations. While the vulnerability only affects those running certain versions of the File Manager plugin, Wordfence reports that cyber attacks are up across the board, as cyber criminals cast a wide net with their attacks.

An estimated 455 million websites run on WordPress, accounting for more than 30% of sites worldwide.
Read more
Shane Chambers No Comments

How To: Creating Safe Passwords in 2020

When is the last time your organisation updated its password policy or sent out guidance to employees around creating safe and secure passwords? It’s been a year since we last updated our guidance on creating safe and secure passwords, so we thought it’s about time for our 2020 edition of “how to keep your accounts secure”. Specifcally, we’ll be looking at current best practice for creating passwords & passphrases and how to leverage multi-factor authentication.

Password guidance is constantly changing, so it’s extremely important to stay up-to-date and keep ahead of cyber criminals!
Read more
Shane Chambers No Comments

‘Privacy Shield’ Regulation Ruled Invalid by EU Court, Complicating EU-US Data Transfer


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.

The EU-US Privacy Shield, like Safe Harbor before it, has been deemed invalid by the European Court of Justice.
Read more
Shane Chambers No Comments

Property Firm Collapses After Ex-Employee Deletes Dropbox

A 58 year old woman in the UK has become one of a handful of people ever convicted under the Computer Misuse Act 1990 after committing an act of ‘revenge’ against a former business associate, causing a new company to cease operations and lay off staff.

The woman, Danielle Bulley, was formerly a director at successful UK-based property magazine Property Press, alongside co-director Alan Marriott. When Bulley and Marriott fell out in 2018, Bulley left the company and Marriott started a new venue called Letterbox Productions – using former assets from Property Press.

Danielle Bulley, a 58 year old British woman with no previous convictions, was sentenced to 18 months of unpaid community service under the Computer Misuse Act 1990.
Read more