Password security plus more this week.
Here is our round up of some of the news throughout this week, including password security and the Morrisons scandal.
First up this week is Morrisons.
We will watch this one with interest. Will Morrisons appeal against being held responsible for a disgruntled employees actions be successful and, more to the point, should it be?
British store WM Morrisons is headed for the Supreme Court to fight a ruling that made it liable for one disgruntled employee dumping the personal details of 100,000 colleagues online. The Court of Appeal upheld an earlier verdict holding the supermarket chain responsible for the actions of IT auditor Andrew Skelton.
Secondly, popular passwords.
Here’s a slightly scary read about just how many people are not doing enough to stay safe online. According to the results of a recent cyber security survey a more than a whopping 23m people worldwide use 123456 as their password.
Here are other results from the survey which have been published in full on www.ncsc.gov.uk
- Only 15% say they know a great deal about how to protect themselves from harmful activity
- The most regular concern is money being stolen – with 42% feeling it likely to happen by 2021
- 89% use the internet to make online purchases – with 39% on a weekly basis
- One in three rely to some extent on friends and family for help on cyber security
- Young people more likely to be privacy conscious and careful of what details they share online
- 61% of internet users check social media daily, but 21% report they never look at social media
- 70% always use PINs and passwords for smart phones and tablets
- Less than half do not always use a strong, separate password for their main email account
Thirdly, parenting and pregnancy.
The ICO has issued parenting and pregnancy club Bounty with a £400,000 fine following the practice the company followed by sharing personal details of their members with third party organisations.
Finally…
Finally after reading about how to get it wrong here is some great advice about what you can do to keep your personal data safe online. These 9 Cyber Security Issues could be easily avoided by following simple steps. Just like this first one.
1. Apple iCloud Restores
Have you ever gorgotten your iphone password but realised that you can still restore data from previous ICloud backups?
Anyone who has ever forgotten their iPhone passcode knows that they can still restore data from their past iCloud backups. Restores work this way because iCloud backups are not encrypted end-to-end; Apple encrypts them, enabling them to decrypt your backups, too! Users who prefer not to expose backup data to Apple can simply disable iCloud backups and encrypt iTunes backups locally instead.