Tag: data breach

Businesses that have taken steps to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation passed by the EU will also have to be compliant with South Africa’s Protection of Personal Information Act by July 2021. Compliance with one, does not ensure compliance with the other.

In an accelerated digital landscape marked by ever-increasing amounts of data processed every day, information technology practitioners must navigate through multiple information lifecycle management practices daily to ensure the veracity of business data.

October marks International Cybersecurity Awareness Month which raises awareness around safety in cyber space as well as the need to upskill and treat cybercrime as a priority. Cyber attacks and disruptive events are on the rise, affecting 82% of organisations surveyed in the Technologies Global Data Protection Index 2020 Snapshot. These organisations included both public and private organisations.

Another day, another data breach. South African businesses are becoming more susceptible to cyberattacks and seem to be easy targets for criminals. Data breaches are now a common phenomenon with Nedbank, Momentum, Lombard Insurance, Experian and Stefanutti Stocks making headline news.

This has been a year of disruption, confusion and now a new ‘normal’. COVID-19 is here for the foreseeable future, and that means humans need to adapt to new circumstances like Working from Home (WFH). Almost every industry has embraced this as an effective way of keeping staff safe, remaining operational and controlling costs during global economic downturn.

While the Protection of Personal Information Act (POPIA) has been in effect for a while, most employers are still not grasping the far-reaching consequences the Act poses on how they collect, store and dispose of information. POPIA affects so many aspects of the business such as the information technology systems, customer processes and information handling practices. Therefore, POPIA cannot be ignored.

The cost of lost business makes up around 40% of the average cost of a large-scale data breach, translating in customer turnover, lost revenue due to system downtime and higher cost of acquiring new business due to reputation damage. This was the finding in a Ponemon Institute research study sponsored by Accenture.

In mid-August 2020, approximately 23.4 million South Africans' personal information was compromised. The data breach was announced by Experian South Africa on 19 August 2020. Correctly, Experian issued a notification to the Information Regulator, but is this enough? Experian stated that 'no consumer credit or consumer financial information was obtained', but what information was then the subject of the breach?

In the modern world, data is regarded as the lifeblood of an organisation. Consequently, cyber threats have taught us that a reactive response to a data breach, regardless of the magnitude of the event, is no longer adequate. All data is important, therefore a more modern and innovative approach needs to be adopted to keeping it safe yet available.

Experian - a consumer, business and credit information services agency – has experienced a breach of data which has exposed some personal information of as many as 24 million South Africans and 793,749 business entities to a suspected fraudster.