Posts about Data Security by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
Every year, we hear about how climate change is worsening. It seems the same story is happening with data security. Last year was the worst year in recorded data breach history. More than 5,200 breaches were reported in 2017, with more than 7.8 billion records compromised. By comparison, there are 7.6 billion people on Earth, […]
In this post, I provide a brief overview of my scholarship last year. Risk and Anxiety: A Theory of Data Breach Harms I co-authored Risk and Anxiety: A Theory of Data Breach Harms with Professor Daniel Keats Citron. The piece is forthcoming in Texas Law Review this year. Even though there continues to be a steady […]
The General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) is one of the world’s strictest data privacy laws and requires privacy professionals around the globe to design and implement comprehensive compliance programs. In the past year, I developed a series of resources and training courses to assist privacy professionals with this complex task. GDPR Whiteboard 200+ pages of […]
Recently, HBO suffered a massive data breach. The hackers stole unreleased episodes of Game of Thrones and have been leaking them before they are broadcast. Episodes of other shows were also stolen. The hackers grabbed 1.5 terabytes of data including sensitive internal documents.
According to a recent Ponemon Institute study, the odds of an organization having a data breach are 1 in 4. The study also found that the average cost of a data breach is $3.62 million in 2017. That’s a drop of 10%, but the size of data breaches has increased. The Human Problem The vast […]
As the FBI warned, ransomware has proven to be a formidable threat costing businesses over $1 billion in 2016, averaging 4,000 attacks per day. Ransomware forces victims to choose between losing access to their files or paying a fee that can range between hundreds and thousands of dollars. Ransomware has already made headlines in the first […]
A common myth is that the U.S. Congress is a leader in creating privacy and data security law. But this has not been true for quite some time. Congress isn’t leading, and even the policies and practices of US companies are increasingly built around the law of the European Union (EU) or the states. In […]
Recently, Congress voted to overturn new FCC rules that regulated the privacy of broadband Internet Service Providers (ISPs). The rules implemented the Communications Act, 47 U.S.C. § 222 to ISPs, requiring opt in for sharing sensitive customer data, opt out for sharing non-sensitive customer data, as well as transparency requirements. Sensitive data includes precise geo-location, children’s […]
Misspelled words and bad grammar are tell-tale signs of phishing. Why don’t phishers learn spelling and grammar? Can’t they afford a copy of Strunk and White? Phishers don’t need to spell better because their poorly-written schemes still fool enough people. It’s just math for the phishers — a numbers game. If you handle IT […]
Last year, major incidents involving law firm data breaches brought attention to the weaknesses within law firm data security and the need for more effective plans and preparation. An American Bar Association (ABA) survey reveals that 26% of firms (with more than 500 attorneys) experienced some sort of data breach in 2016, up from 23% in 2015.