The ICO have fined estate agent, Life at Parliament View Limited (LPV), £80,000 for security failings relating to tenant information.
The breach occurred in 2015 (which is why this was dealt with under “old” data protection and not GDPR). It occurred when an insecure FTP (file transfer service) server was used to transfer just over 18,600 tenant records to a third party. Only problem was the FTP server was not secure and allowed “anonymous” access to the server and therefore the data was accessible to unauthorised parties, and in fact was left “live” on the server in this state for a couple of years. The issue here is one of taking appropriate organisational and technical measures to ensure the security of personal data, with the ICO finding:
- The “anonymous” access allowed unauthorised parties to access and download the data
- Whilst there was some encryption in place it didn’t encrypt transfers of the data to non-registered users
- The types of personal data included names, addresses, dates of birth, income, employment details (including salary, payroll numbers, etc.) and also contained images of passports and bank statements, etc.
The lack of security wasn’t noticed for 2 years – once it had LPV remedied the issue but noticed over 500,000 anonymous login events (1,213 unique IP addresses) indicating that anonymous access had been used and then in October 2017 a hacker contacted LPV (with evidence) that they possessed the information and they would release it publicly unless a ransom was paid.
So all in all, the fine reflects the lack of security and exposure of extensive personal data for a significant number of data subjects, but actually we can learn much more from the ICO’s enforcement notice about what their thinking is with regards to what constitutes appropriate organisational and technical measures:
- Make sure systems are configured correctly and there are no “general” unauthenticated means of access (even if specific users are given login/passwords)
- Monitoring of systems and access logs should be carried out, once set up, to keep an eye on any unusual or unexpected behaviour
- Penetration testing or other checks should be carried out to alert to vulnerabilities
- Make sure employees fully understand the consequences and therefore need to ensure security of personal data at all time, whether those employees are configuring the systems or using them
As mentioned, the above enforcement was taken under Data Protection Act 1998 and not GDPR, with the ICO able to fine up to 4% of global turnover or €20m, we wonder what the GDPR equivalent fine would have been…
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