At the end of June, the California legislature passed its Bill 375, the California Consumer Privacy Act of 2018. The Act contains a number of concepts that would be familiar to those who are working to bring their companies and organizations into compliance with GDPR. The new law defines a category of “Personal Information” that
Information Security
Is Data Really a “Toxic” Asset?
In his “Data Is a Toxic Asset” blog post, Bruce Schneier argues that data is a toxic asset and that the lesson all the recent data breaches are teaching us is that storing this asset is “dangerous,” because it makes companies vulnerable to hackers, the government, and employee error. Schneier suggests addressing data breaches through stronger regulation at every stage of the data lifecycle and through personal liability of corporate executives. “Data is a toxic asset,” concludes Schneier, “We need to start thinking about it as such, and treat it as we would any other source of toxicity. To do anything else is to risk our security and privacy.”
Calling data a “toxic asset” sensationalizes the data-security conversation into alarmist territory. The term “toxic asset” has a certain meaning in financial circles and typically refers to assets that become illiquid when they no longer can be sold on a secondary market. This hardly applies to data, which is more of a lifeblood for corporations than toxic asset.
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Defense Contractors – Under the DOD’s Interim Rule, It Is Time Once Again To Update Your Data Breach Response Plans
In an interim final rule published on October 2, another layer has been added to the compliance landscape for defense contractors. In addition to complying with breach notification requirements in as many as 47 different states in the event of a breach involving personally identifiable information, Department of Defense contractors now have to comply with the rapid notification rules issues by DOD in the even of a cyber incident involving covered defense information. These rules are noteworthy in that they require DOD contractors to report cyber incidents within 72 hours of discovering the incident. Most state breach notification statutes do not require that individuals be notified of a breach within a specific number of days and the few state statutes that do have such a requirement contain a much more lenient timeframe of 45 to 90 days.
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