Two data breaches of government systems have made headlines since late May. One involved the Internal Revenue Service where hackers gained access to 104,000 tax returns. This pales in comparison to the hack of the Office of Personnel Management where the personal data of 21.5 million current and former employees, as well as applicants was breached.
One of the questions testers, legislators, and even insurance companies are asking is who or what is at fault when a self-driving car crashes? Will it be the other driver, the autonomous car, or some combination? In addition, what testing procedures will the automaker need to follow when testing the vehicle, and whose insurance covers an accident if the self-driving technology is to blame for the accident?
Two huge data breaches made front page news in the past two weeks. Home Depot discovered its systems were compromised in September exposing the data of 56 million credit and debit card holders. The good news, at least for now, is there’s no evidence the personal identification numbers for customer debit cards were compromised.
I attended a class on cyber liability insurance earlier this week. It was hosted by one of my commercial insurance companies in their Richardson office. It covered a brief history of this insurance, outlined what’s covered, requirements, potential liability issues and impact, as well as data breach trends.
Businesses have all kinds of plans; marketing plans, strategic plans, safety plans, sales plans, production plans, staffing plans, and even cash management plans. But do you have a data breach plan? If we’ve learned anything over the past 7 months, data breaches do occur, and they seem to be occurring at a faster rate than ever before.
Unless you’ve totally unplugged from all news media and the internet over the past week, you’ve heard of the Heartbleed bug. The Heartbleed bug (it’s not a virus) is a vulnerability in the OpenSSL library, the software that makes your website and other sites secure when a person is reviewing banking records, making a purchase from your company, or updating their information or method of payment in their on-line account.
Target and news services disclosed late last week the PIN numbers of debit cards were also obtained as a part of the data stolen during the debit and credit card breach at US Target stores from November 27th through December 15th. Security analysts recommend anyone who used their debit card at Target during these dates go ahead and change their PIN number.
One of my clients emailed me on Saturday. She’d recently shopped at a Dallas area Target store to pick up some items for Christmas and had just read the news about the credit card breach at Target stores across the country. She was concerned and wanted to know what to do.
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