Last week we held our annual RADAR User Summit. This event brings together a group of innovative, forward-thinking privacy professionals for three days of interactive workshops, best practice sharing, and general community building.
This was my first year in attendance, and what struck me about the event was the amount of shared experience in the room – our attendees came from across the country, from different industries, and from companies of varying sizes, but they found common ground in the challenges they face as privacy professionals.
Diving back into our regular routines this week, the privacy news making headlines certainly reinforces the sentiment that a privacy professional’s work is never done. The challenges to this profession abound, and the consequences of poor incident response can be costly. Here are some of the notable stories the RADAR team and our partners and customers are talking about between sessions and in the days following last week’s User Summit:
Data breaches are getting more costly, according to this article from WhiteHat Security. The cost of noncompliance is known, and the hard-to-quantify value of a strong privacy program is getting more and more recognition. The article also cites the Forrester report, The State of Application Security: “‘terms like data protection, privacy program, and compliance won’t get the attention of business partners, but customer trust, revenue growth, and ethics will.'”
Companies need to be aware of the threat of class-action lawsuits for data breaches. Recently, Epic Games has been hit with a lawsuit involving the players affected by an issue with the game Fortnite’s login system. The lawsuit was filed for “failure to maintain adequate security measures and notify users of the security breach in a timely manner.”
Here’s a breakdown of the biggest breaches over the last 15 years.
A study of the first year of GDPR’s impacts in the UK. “As our report explores, not all security incidents require notification to the regulator,” wrote Stuart Davey of Pinsent Masons. “We are only one year into GDPR and it will be interesting to see reporting figures this time next year and the impact that another twelve months will have on levels of reporting.”
Improperly managed data and resulting data breaches are also seeing their repercussions felt in company valuations. Marriott International Inc. booked a $126 million charge last quarter due to a massive data breach. Subsequently, this lowered their financial projections for the year, with second-quarter profit dropped 65%.
If you’d like to share what privacy and data breach news is currently on your radar, we would love to hear from you at [email protected].