In this week’s Data Privacy News….
After Hackers managed to infiltrate Twitter’s blue tick accounts last night, users with the notable “high visability” accounts received scam tweets supporting bitcoin.
The social media platform clamped down on the breach shortly after.
Bill Gates, Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos were three such accounts hackers managed to compromise. Others included Apple’s official Twitter account, with tweets typically promising to double people’s investment in digital currency bitcoin.
In a series of tweets, Twitter explained:
We detected what we believe to be a coordinated social engineering attack by people who successfully targeted some of our employees with access to internal systems and tools.
Source & full story: MSN
A highly anticipated ruling by Europe’s top court has just landed — striking down a flagship EU-US data flows arrangement known by many as Privacy Shield.
The Court of Justice invalidates Decision 2016/1250 on the adequacy of the protection provided by the EU-US Data Protection Shield,” it writes in a press release.
The CJEU’s finding is that “the requirements of US national security, public interest and law enforcement have primacy, thus condoning interference with the fundamental rights of persons whose data are transferred to that third country”, and that mechanisms in the EU-US Privacy Shield ostensibly intended to mitigate this interference (such as an ombudsperson role to handle EU citizens’ complaints) are not up the required legal standard of ‘essential equivalence’ with EU law.
Source & full story: TechCrunch, EU Court of Justice
Austrian privacy activist Max Schrems on Thursday welcomed a decision by the European Union’s top court in his case against Facebook , saying the legal basis for more then 5,000 U.S. companies that use an EU tool to transfer Europeans’ personal data to the United States for commercial use has been annulled.
“It looks perfect,” he said in a spontaneous reaction when the ruling hit headlines at his office in Vienna.
Europe’s top court on Thursday rejected the so-called Privacy Shield agreement but upheld the validity of another tool used by hundreds of thousands of companies to transfer data worldwide.
Source & full story: MSN
Google has received a record fine from Belgium’s data protection authority (APD) of 600,000 euros for not complying with European rules on a person’s “right to be forgotten” online.
The 600,000 euro penalty is the largest ever imposed by APD, it said on Tuesday, and more than 10 times bigger than the authority’s previous record penalty.
Google failed to remove links from its search results to articles which APD said were “obsolete” and damaging to the reputation of a person with a public profile in Belgium.
A Google spokesperson said:
We didn’t believe this case met the European Court of Justice’s criteria for delisting published journalism from search — we thought it was in the public’s interest that this reporting remain searchable,
Source & full story: Reuters
Connected devices will finally get a major security upheaval to stop them from becoming easy prey to hackers following a major step forward by the UK government.
This means manufacturers will need to ensure new devices feature proper passwords and security protection.
Digital minister Matt Warman said:
This is a significant step forward in our plans to help make sure smart products are secure and people’s privacy is protected….. I urge organisations to respond to these proposals so we can make the UK the safest place to be online with pro-innovation regulation that inspires consumer confidence in our tech products. People should continue to change default passwords on their smart devices and regularly update software to help protect themselves from cyber criminals.
Source & full story: TechRadar
