Archive of all posts about data security by Professor Daniel J. Solove for his blog at TeachPrivacy, a privacy awareness and security training company.
I hope you enjoy my latest cartoon about passwords on the Dark Web. These days, it seems, login credentials and other personal data are routinely stocking the shelves of the Dark Web. Last year, a hacker was peddling 117 million LinkedIn user email and passwords. And, late last year, researchers found a file with 1.4 billion passwords […]
In In re Zappos.com, Inc., Customer Data Security Breach Litigation (9th Cir., Mar. 8, 2018), the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 9th Circuit issued a decision that represents a more expansive way to understand data security harm. The case arises out of a breach where hackers stole personal data on 24 million+ individuals. Although […]
Recently, South Dakota and Alabama passed data breach notification laws. These were the last two states to pass such laws, and now all 50 states have breach notification laws. There’s also a federal breach notification requirement under HIPAA (passed with the HITECH Act of 2009). In 2003, California passed the first data breach notification law. […]
My new article was just published: Risk and Anxiety: A Theory of Data Breach Harms, 96 Texas Law Review 737 (2018). I co-authored the piece with Professor Danielle Keats Citron. We argue that the issue of harm needs a serious rethinking. Courts are too quick to conclude that data breaches don’t create harm. There are two […]
It’s time for another installment of the funniest hacker stock photos. Because I create information security awareness training (and HIPAA security training too), I’m always in the hunt for hacker photos. For this round, I focus on the future of hacking, so I looked closely for hacker stock photos that depicted the most state-of-the-art hacking […]
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, […]
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 […]
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 […]