News
First Annual Report from the DPC
The first annual report from the Data Protection Commission, under the auspices of the GDPR has just been released.
Read MoreNot GDPR Compliant – Really?
A colleague at another company forwarded me an email he’d received knowing that I’d get a kick out of it. It claimed to be from the UK GDPR Compliance Directory and that his company was not GDPR compliant. Of course no such directory exists and this was nothing but a ruse.
Read MoreWhatsapp Authentication Sucks
Whatsapp Authentication sucks. It sucks really badly. I’d never thought about it before, but then I saw this tweet yesterday. A lady got a new phone number and when she set up Whatsapp, she had a load of messages on there from the previous owner of the number.
Read MoreLuas Ransomware Incident – Offline a while now
How did you hear about the Luas Ransomware incident? Was it on the news? Online? Facebook? Twitter? Instagram? Or did you happen to visit the website to check some fare information and get confronted by a very basic ransom demand.
Read MoreReview of my 2018 predictions.
I continue not to see many people who make predictions for the coming year actually come back to review what they predicted. As I showed last year, I’m not one of those, so here is my review. I’ve included the original text below in blue, but the full article for my 2018 predictions is here.
Read MorePaying Ransomware may break the law
Some businesses that are affected by a Ransomware incident, make a decision to pay the criminals in order to recover their data. This is usually because they believe it is more expensive to go through the recovery process. If they have poor or non-existent backups, then that may very well be the case, so they…
Read MoreDash cam – Machina Non Grata.
A dash cam is a popular Christmas present or indeed a present at any time of year. I got one earlier this year and have been having it merrily record the road ahead of my car ever since. I was doing this with the belief that the household exemption covered such recording. This is the…
Read MoreHoax Bomb Extortion Emails Are Latest Scam
In the last couple of days there are reports of hoax bomb threats being sent by e-mail. They’ve been particularly prevalent in the USA, but there is nothing to stop them spreading. They’ve targeted schools, government facilities and some businesses.
Read MoreSextortion Scam Volume 3
Remember the original Sextortion scam back in July? The one where they used an old password to make it look like the e-mail was plausible. This then evolved in August to add the use of partial mobile numbers. Well, it’s BAAAACKK!!!
Read MoreData Breaches Everywhere
It’s beginning to look a lot like Christmas … has come early for the evil doers. There just seems to be a relentless tale of data breach after data breach in recent weeks and it has been really bad in the last week.
Read MoreGDPR fines are starting to come.
Shortly after I posted about the Austrian GDPR fine, another fine was issued by the regulatory authority in Portugal. Late last week the German regulatory authority imposed another fine on an App maker. So the GDPR fines are beginning to come. Let’s take a quick look at these three cases and then see what you…
Read MoreShopping Safely Online – 2018 Edition
Like it or lump it, today is Cyber Monday here in Ireland now, because the retailers want it to be. So we have adopted another US tradition. Most Irish people prefer to buy their stuff in bricks and mortar stores. Online shopping, though, has been growing dramatically in recent years.
Read MoreNUI Galway Data Breach – Lessons learned?
The NUI Galway data breach that was revealed this week is concerning. Particularly the initial reports about the breach, which weren’t very clear.
Read MoreFacebook are only fined £500,000
You remember the Facebook/Cambridge Analytica mess from earlier this year? Well, Facebook have been issued with a notice that they are to be fined £500,000 as a result of this. “What? Facebook are only fined £500,000?” I hear you cry.
Read MoreGDPR hasn’t gone away.
Something I’ve noticed since the summer holidays came to an end, interest in GDPR related training and discussions have dropped away. I’ve asked around why this might be. The most common type of response is “Sure that GDPR thing was a pile of scare mongering. Nothing has happened. It’s like that Y2K nonsense we had…
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