A new press release reports, “This Data Privacy Day, we urge individuals and organisations around the world to learn from the fallout of the mega-breaches of the recent past. We provide five positive steps that companies around the world can take to better protect consumers, employees and more. Until recently, data privacy was only considered critical in the digital world. But as the digital and physical worlds intersect, it is now integral not only to securing an individual or a corporation’s digital identity, but also to avoiding the safety of citizens being compromised. Data privacy considerations should underpin all company decisions, whether on the board level or on the shop floor and, this Data Privacy Day, organisations should encourage their entire workforce – not just IT teams – to re-evaluate how they secure and manage data… This Data Privacy Day, we need to take a step back to not only understand the value in the data we hold, but also the importance of only allowing individuals and systems that need it to access it.”

The release goes on, “Mega Breach lesson #1: Equifax Breach (reported in 2017) – Several tech failures in tandem–including a misconfigured device scanning encrypted traffic, and an automatic scan that failed to identify a vulnerable version of Apache Struts–ultimately led to the breach which impacted 145M customers in the US and 10M UK citizens. Data Privacy Day Learning – get security basics right. Cyberattacks are growing more targeted and damaging but a good industry reminder from the Equifax breach is that standard security basics should never be ignored. Patches should be applied promptly, security certificates should be maintained, and so on. This breach also inspired elected officials to push for stronger legislation to tighten regulations on required protection for consumer data.”

Read the rest of the list at cxotoday.com.

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