France Cracked Down on Google’s Ad Tech. What’s Next?

The French Competition Agency has hit the company with $855 million in fines this year. The money is meaningless—but the changes could be profound...

American Express Fined Over Millions of Spam Messages

American Express Services Europe has been fined £90,000 $127,377 by a U.K. regulator, which found the company illegally blasted out 4 million marketing emails to customers who had opted out of receiving them. Critics said the fine, which is nominal for the multi-national financial brand, isn’t...

CEOs Could Be Held Personally Liable for Cyberattacks that Kill

A full 75 percent of top brass at companies will be personally on the hook for cyber-physical security CSP incidents by 2024 – especially those that involve fatalities. That’s according to the Gartner research firm, which predicted this week that CEOs soon will no longer be able to hide behind...

Why Application Security Should Be Considered An Enabler For Business

If you ask Alex, he won't admit being old-fashioned. He has been working in the IT industry for a while now and accepts that security is important for the business's health. But reluctant to take security as the business enabler. In today's environment, moving to digitization is a critical step...

FCC Proposes to Fine Wireless Carriers $200M for Selling Customer Location Data

The U.S. Federal Communications Commission FCC today proposed fines of more than $200 million against the nation's four largest wireless carriers for selling access to their customers' location information without taking adequate precautions to prevent unauthorized access to that data. While the...

South Korean Data Protection Laws

I am a Senior CIAM Solution Engineer. While doing research to prepare for a client conversation, I discovered a number of International Data Protection laws that are less talked about than GDPR or CCPA, but are important considerations for global brands. To help you better navigate the complex...

California Adopts Strictest Privacy Law in U.S.

A landmark privacy rights bill took effect Jan. 1, 2020 in California and will have broad implications for U.S. consumers and businesses. The California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA mandates strict requirements for companies to notify users about how their user data will be used and monetized along...

Download: The Comprehensive Compliance Guide

A large part of the CISO/CIO responsibility is ensuring compliance standards are met. As one of the main drivers of security product purchase and implementation, regulation comes in many different shapes and sizes. Some standards provide clear consequences for failure to meet them. Others provide...

Data Breach Fines: Are They Working to Boost Consumer Safety?

Breach statistics are downright discouraging: Over the past five years the number of businesses breached has skyrocketed. The human consequences are also bad, with billions of private email addresses, bankcard numbers and other deeply personal data points exposed online and now in the hands of...

Execs Could Face Jail Time For Privacy Violations

A new data privacy bill threatens large tech firms, like Facebook, with tough penalties – including monetary fines and up to 20 years of jail time for executives – if they violate user privacy policies. The “Mind Your Own Business Act,” proposed by Sen. Ron Wyden D-Ore. on Thursday, gives the...

Understanding CCPA: It's Time to Action a Plan for Compliance

Notice to all procrastinators: The final countdown to the California Consumer Privacy Act CCPA has begun. On January 1, 2020, companies or organizations that do business in California will be required to comply with the state's strict new privacy legislation that establishes a legal and enforceab...

License Plate "NULL"

There was a DefCon talk by someone with the vanity plate "NULL." The California system assigned him every ticket with no license plate: $12,000. Although the initial $12,000-worth of fines were removed, the private company that administers the database didn't fix the issue and new NULL tickets ar...

Clear Message Sent: Don’t Roll the Dice on Data Privacy Compliance

Last month, two leading companies each received what were then record-setting fines for data breach violations: £183 million for British Airways and then, just two weeks later, $5 billion for Facebook. Regulators sent a clear message to organizations around the world — if you don't treat your...

No summer break for Magecart as web skimming intensifies

This summer, you are more likely to find the cybercriminal groups Magecart client-side rather than poolside. Web skimming, which consists of stealing payment information directly from within the browser, is one of today's top web threats. Magecart, the group behind many of these attacks, gained...

Equifax to Pay $700 Million in 2017 Data Breach Settlement

Equifax will pay as much as $700 million to settle federal and state investigations on the heels of its infamous 2017 breach, which exposed the data of almost 150 million customers. The consumer credit reporting agency on Monday said it will dish out $300 million to cover free credit monitoring...

2.3B Files Exposed in a Year: A New Record for Misconfigs

The last 12 months has seen the exposure of a record 2.3 billion files across cloud databases and online shares, according to an analysis released on Thursday. A report from Digital Shadows’ Photon Research Team, Too Much Information: The Sequel, assessed the scale of inadvertent global data...

News Wrap: Amazon Echo Privacy, Facebook FTC Fines and Biometrics Regulation

Data privacy has been an outstanding theme this past week, and the Threatpost team discussed the biggest privacy related news. In the news wrap podcast for April 26, the team discussed the backstories behind several reports from the week, including: Facebook potentially facing Federal Trade...

How Hospitals Can Tie Cost Reduction to a Solid Data Security Program

When I have conversations with hospitals and other organizations subject to HIPAA, one of the first questions asked is "if I have a data breach, will OCR fine me, and if so, how much?" Many organizations decide to gamble: they opt to save time and money by not implementing a robust information ri...

Google Fined $57M in Largest GDPR Slap Yet

France’s National Data Protection Commission CNIL has fined Google $57 million €50 million for violations of the General Data Protection Regulation GDPR – the largest fine yet issued under the EU’s new data privacy law. In investigating group complaints from privacy advocacy groups None Of Your...

Google fined $57 million by France for lack of transparency and consent

The French data protection watchdog CNIL has issued its first fine of €50 million around $57 million under the European Union's new General Data Protection Regulation GDPR law that came into force in May last year. The fine has been levied on Google for "lack of transparency, inadequate informati...