Are you actually identifying data breaches?

by | Apr 17, 2020 | Privacy | 0 comments

Published 29 August, 2018

The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has released its first full quarterly statistics report for data breached reported during the period 1 April and 30 June 2018. A total of 242 data breach reports were made across health service, finance, legal, accounting, education, business and professional industries.

As expected, the largest source of data breaches come from malicious or criminal attacks against businesses (approximately 59%). However, a source of data breaches that sometimes goes under the radar is data breaches resulting from human error, which made up the second largest source of data breaches in the quarter (approximately 36%). Your employees may not realise that making a simple error in their day-to-day activities may have actually resulted in a data breach.

To ensure your business is complying with its privacy obligations to identify data breaches, you need to ensure that employees are educated about what a data breach is, including some of the common examples below and that they are promptly reporting these incidents to your data breach response team.