TechLetters #89 UK election cyberrisk with zero risk, Swiss bug bounty, businesses destroyed by a breach, Indirect/inferred data are #GDPR protected data
Security
Voting for the new UK prime minister postponed. NCSC/GCHQ warned that the system contains a weakness and potentially someone else could exploit it to cast votes or change the votes casted. The system apparently allowed casting votes multiple times? Oops. Anyway, the impact would be negligible because only two persons, from the same party, are competing.
Switzerland’s government started a bug bounty program. Federal/governmental systems aBre open for testing. Which ones? “as many systems as possible in the federal administration”.
List of confirmed businesses destroyed by cyberattacks. The list is obviously incomplete. But indeed, impacts of cyberattacks/breach may lead to bankruptcy and going out of business. Privacy
UK emergency health service disrupted. Described as a cyberattack. Not clear what was the issue, some software (Adastra) system is affected. This may have caused an influx of physical GP (medical) visits, or the system was preparing for this.
Privacy
Indirect/inferred data are protected by GDPR. The processing of data that may indirectly indicate sensitive data is equivalent to processing of sensitive data and is subject to protection. Very important disambiguation, probably also applies to processing for the purposes of e.g. targeting ads.
Private information on Twitter accounts accessed. Data breach. Data on "5.4 million users" potentially affected. That would make it among the biggest breaches of the kind since #GDPR entered into force.
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Re: Voting for the new UK prime minister postponed.
"Anyway, the impact would be negligible because only two persons, from the same party, are competing." ... Not at all. The reason that the NCSC and GCHQ pitched in simply because the undermining of an electoral process in which the leader of the UK is chosen is clearly very important in protecting the rule of law and a democracy. Was easy to see how an adversary might exploit this to question belief in UK's political selection processes and undermine the government.