News

The UK operation of Zurich Insurance has been fined £2.27m by the Financial Services Authority (FSA) for losing personal details of 46,000 customers. It is the highest fine levied on a single firm for data security failings. Margaret Cole, the FSA’s director of enforcement and financial crime, said: “Zurich UK let its customers down badly.” Stephen Lewis, chief executive of Zurich UK, said: “This incident was unacceptable.” The data on policyholders, including in some cases bank account and credit card [...]

Originally from scmagazineuk.com. The Ministry of Defence (MoD) has admitted that it has lost 340 laptops in the past two years with less than half having encrypted data. In a response to a Freedom of Information request by Lewis PR, the MoD revealed that 120 laptops were stolen and 220 were lost. Only 25 were recovered. Also, 593 CDs, DVDs and floppy disks, 215 USB memory sticks, 96 hard-disk drives and 13 mobile phones also went missing, many containing sensitive [...]

As the UK’s new coalition Government well knows, 2010-11 is going to be a significant year. The economy is in recovery, and the biggest challenge facing our new government will be to protect – and build on – this trend. It’s the same story for companies all around the world. 2009-10 was tough, but now this is the year to put into practice those lessons learned …and grow. Organisations have stripped much of the fat out of their operations, and [...]

The Gradian team is joining forces with Proofpoint at this year’s Infosecurity Europe event. Together we’re best placed to tackle the latest trends and threats in email security, compliance, data leak prevention and email archiving – whilst providing the best ongoing service and consultancy. At this year’s show the Gradian and Proofpoint teams will be focusing on the huge threat posed by outbound email, which can lead to breach of compliance and unintentional data leakage. We’re tackling this issue through [...]

The IT Directors’ Forum takes place in June, and it’s interesting to note that one of the highest priorities for these executives is security. The event organisers survey their attendees in advance of the event, and the results have so far revealed that a high percentage are earmarking the majority of their 2010-11 budgets on security solutions. The IT Directors’ profiles indicate that access control and data security are the two areas that will receive the most funding. Hot on [...]

Gradian’s security experts recently delivered an absorbing presentation at the Berkshire branch of the British Computer Society (BCS). The team put forward the thought-provoking question “Do you really know who is who and what is where, online?” To address the issue, the team looked at technologies such as account-based authentication through to data signing and transaction validation, which enable users to know exactly who they are interacting with. As well as these specific areas of authentication technology, the team also [...]

Symantec is set to pick up fellow security firm MessageLabs for $695 million (£400 million), it announced today.