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ARTICLE · 22 AUGUST 2017

Clearing the cloudiness around third party vendor breaches

Sparke Helmore Lawyers
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Entities affected by the mandatory data breach notification scheme should assess any internal risk policies and coverage.

AustraliaPrivacy
Edward Osborne
Edward Osborne
Colin Pausey
Colin Pausey
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Cloud-based data hosting and the use of third party vendors to manage and process data are fast becoming ubiquitous in today's online world. The rapid expansion of such third party digital ecosystems, which often extend across jurisdictions and territorial borders, comes with added cyber security risks.

In the past 12 months we have seen a number of notable data breaches (not always involving a "hack" of information) relating to third party vendors, including cloud-based data hosts, that have had wide-reaching impact. For example:

  • In June 2017, the personal information of close to 200 million American voters was found to have been exposed on a publicly-accessible cloud server, supposedly due to a simple misconfiguration error.

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