In response to the news that Equifax is to be fined £500,000 by the ICO after it failed to protect the personal data of 15 million Britons, IT security experts commented below.
Jake Moore, Security Specialist at ESET:
“The ICO has given the highest possible fine under the 1998 Data Protection Act. If this breach had occurred after May 2018 it would have most likely been a different story and possibly the scapegoat so many companies are currently fearing not to be.
With this in mind, it will be extremely interesting to see how much the ICO fines the large corporations and, in particular, if they choose to keep this fine representative so that they do not take the companies under.
Typically when such companies are attacked, their customer trust is equally attacked making it difficult to bounce back naturally.”
Deborah Change, VP Policy and Business Development at HackerOne:
“Equifax was careless and companies that are careless with the data they are privileged enough to access have committed cyber negligence. While the fines are modest in comparison to the damage done, the awareness of this breach should have a lasting impact, hopefully making consumers safer in the long run. This should be a lesson for other companies, and we should watch how American regulators respond, and how the UK enforces data protection under GDPR.”
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Lev Lesokhin, SVP Strategy at CAST:
“The solution is NOT to rely on the ability to hire good developers so they write good software – there just aren’t enough skilled developers with whole-system vision to go around. We need to take our most senior developers, have them design the architectures for data protection, and then ensure these architectural constructs are followed by the developer plebiscite with every build.”
