Equifax settle for $US700 million for their 2017 data breach!
Has IT ever told you data security is important? For more than 20 years we have been hearing how important encryption will be for data and why it will benefit companies not just from a privacy point of view, but also for a security.
Governments around the world have been slowly waking up to the ever-increasing threat, largely due to the increase in breaches of people’s personally identifiable information. These breaches have increased identity fraud and theft, they have been known to put lives in danger and sadly, in many cases, have been met with toothless threats and a punishment of “just don’t do it again!”.
Thankfully, in the last 3 years, with input from lobbying groups and industry bodies, we have seen the creation and implementation of GDPR (in Europe) and the NDB Scheme (in Australia) to combat this very real risk. These measures and guidelines have given government bodies a very real ability to deliver harsher punishments to organisations found to be handling our data in ways that would be considered risky or that put our personal information at threat.
This week the first of these cases has finally been tested in the best of ways and resulted in a big win for us all. Equifax, the global credit monitoring organisation agreed to pay a settlement of $US700 million which stemmed from a 2017 data breach that exposed the information of over 150 million people. This was one of the largest identified data breaches in history and the largest at the time by an organisation.
At Ambient iT we welcome such a heavy punishment and look forward to this new environment where our data is considered with the appropriate respect and value it deserves. If you are worried that you may not have the appropriate measures in place to protect you or your clients data, or you simply want the peace of mind knowing that you have done the best you can, get in touch with our team and we will work with you to help keep your data protected and secure.