A new white paper from international brokers Lockton – Exposed in Europe, Data Breaches and Their Impact in a Changing Legal and Regulatory Environment – warns European organizations that “prefer not to notify data breaches are living on borrowed time.”
Lockton explained that the “warning comes the day after the UK’s coalition government produced a new national security strategy that ranks cyber attack and cyber crime as a high priority risk. In a speech yesterday in Germany, the UK’s Foreign Minister William Hague said the UK has pledged to spend £650 million [$1.043 billion] on a national cyber security program.”
According to the Lockton paper, written by two of the independent and privately owned broker’s Global Technology and Privacy Risks experts Emily Freeman and Ben Beeson, “There are strong indications that Europe is at a tipping point in its legal and regulatory environment surrounding data breaches.”
The eight-page paper also advises organizations to consider the potential implications of the E-Privacy Directive 2002/58/EC (due to come into effect early this year) which will introduce obligations on Internet Service Providers and telecoms companies to notify the authorities and potentially affected individuals of a data breach.
The paper quotes figures released by the privacy, data protection and information security analysts at the Ponemon Institute, which show that while the UK still lags some way behind the US in terms of the loss business resulting from data breaches, other parts of Europe, Germany in particular, are rapidly catching up.
The paper concludes: “No organization can ultimately make itself invulnerable to the actions of a malicious insider with trusted access, either as an employee or an employee of a key vendor. [But] beyond internal risk management, there is now an increasing array of cyber insurance solutions available in the US, London and European insurance market that can help offset some of the specific costs of a data breach.”
Source: Lockton
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