A court in Moscow fined Twitter and Facebook 4 million rubles each Thursday for refusing to store the personal data of Russian citizens on servers in Russia, the largest penalties imposed on Western technology companies under internet use laws.The fines of nearly $63,000 are the first five-figure fines levied on tech companies since Russia adopted a flurry o

Facebook and its Irish data regulator gave conflicting signals Thursday about what caused the tech giant to postpone the European launch of its vaunted dating app.The California-based behemoth stood up a chunk of its 2.5 billion monthly users on the eve of Valentines Day by admitting that Facebook Dating would not be ready for its hyped Thursday debut in the

More than 15.1 billion records were exposed in 2019 as part of the data breaches that were publicly reported, Risk Based Security reveals.The number of exposed records registered a massive 284% spike compared to the previous year (which had 5.3 billion records exposed), and also marked a 91% increase compared to 2017 (7.95 billion records).A total of 7.2 bil

During 2019, new privacy laws were introduced, and many current laws evolved in the United States and across the global landscape. With the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) in full effect, we saw expensive fines levied upon companies that fell victim to data privacy breaches. As we move into a new year, probably the biggest takeaway from 2019 is tha

It’s that time of year again, where we look back at, and reflect on, the previous 12 months. In that spirit, here’s the BH Consulting review of 2019. The roundup we present is our take on cybersecurity, data protection and privacy issues.  As regular readers will know, we don’t aim to be a website of record when it comes to chronicling the latest malware out

Due to market growth and continued expansion, BH Consulting is looking to augment its growing DPO-as-a-service team by hiring a new Data Protection Consultant. The candidate is passionate about data protection and is keen to demonstrate this. The candidate has at least 5 years experience in data protection or IT data project management, and is likely to be c

Security is a busy field, and 2019 was no exception. Following last week’s blog looking back at the first six months of the year, here’s the second part covering cybersecurity, data protection and privacy stories that emerged between July and December.  July Summertime and the living wasn’t easy if your company was called BA or Marriott. The UK Information C

In an ideal world, humans would only ever learn from doing things right, but failure is a persistent teacher. That’s why for every Norsk Hydro or Maersk competently and professionally handling major security incidents, there’s also a Travelex. In this blog, we dig into why the world’s largest foreign exchange company has become the latest cyber scapegoat. We

Cosmetic company Estée Lauder exposed 440 million records to the Internet in a database that was left accessible without proper protection, a security researcher says.Headquartered in New York, Estée Lauder sells products in more than 135 countries and territories. The Estée Lauder Companies owns multiple internationally renowned brands. The exposed dat

Beginning March, when Firefox 74 is set to arrive in the release channel, Mozilla will disable older Transport Layer Security (TLS) protocol versions as default options for secure connections.An improvement over the Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) protocol, TLS is meant to improve the security of the Web, but flaws and weaknesses in older iterations, specifically

An election application used by Israel’s Likud party has exposed the personal information of over 6 million voters.Likud, the party of Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, has contracted a company named Feed-b to create an election management system called Elector, which has been advertised as highly secure.Developer and journalist Ran Bar-Zik discover

Artificial intelligence (AI) isn’t new. What is new is the growing ubiquity of AI in large organizations. In fact, by the end of this year, I believe nearly every type of large organization will find AI-based cybersecurity tools indispensable. Artificial intelligence is many things to many people. One fairly neutral definition is that it’s a bran

Organizations today have to balance the need for continuous evolution along the digital continuum with the need to protect their data and operations and keep cyber risk at an acceptable level. The chief information security officer (CISO) role is uniquely positioned to help organizations manage those dualities, but it requires a different set of leadership q

Irish regulators have launched separate inquiries into Google and dating app Tinder over how they process user data, in a new round of regulatory scrutiny aimed at tech companies.Ireland’s Data Protection Commission said Tuesday that it decided to look into how Google handles location data after a number of consumer groups across the European Union filed com

Concentric Emerges from Stealth with AI Document Classification Product and $7.5 Million Seed FundingUnstructured documents -- especially those that have been given wrong or no sensitivity classification -- are among the most difficult assets for any enterprise to track and secure. Problems come from staff inappropriately sharing and insecurely storing docum