How Not To Handle A Cyber Security Attack

In September Equifax suffered a major cyber security attack which resulted in the personal data of an estimated 143 million people being compromised. The manner in which the company reacted in the aftermath of the hack is evidence of an organisation that was ill-prepared and is likely to trigger an investigation on several fronts by several different regulators.

Not only did the company appear not to have a plan for how to react to an event of this nature, it seems that it may not have been in compliance with key data protection principles embodied in current European Union (EU) data privacy regulation and expanded upon in the new General Data Protection Regulation coming into force in the EU next year.