CYBER CRIME
HACKING AND NEW DATA LAWS: THE DOUBLE WHAMMY FOR BUSINESSES?
asks Rory Campbell, Forde Campbell LLC
H
ave I ever had an LA Law moment? You know, that moment when the legal team start whooping, punching the air and highfiving?
Yes, once. Our client’ s rival refused to admit it was hacking our client’ s site.“ Prove it,” was their position, knowing that the hacks came via dynamic IP addresses, whose owners’ identities were known only to the internet service provider.
So, one court order later, we“ persuaded” the ISP to identify the owners of twenty sample IP addresses. Bingo: seventeen out of the twenty were registered to the rival’ s CEO and head developer. The LA Law moment.
But this was several years ago, when hacking was less sophisticated and far less widespread. It wasn’ t in any way a typical hack. We had a good idea who the culprit was. Typically, business hackers are faceless.
We knew the hack was occurring on a repeating basis, and could even predict roughly when it would next occur. In contrast, according to Simon Whitaker of local cyber security experts Vertical Structure, the“ overwhelming proportion of businesses simply never know when a hack will occur”: a 2016 industry report recorded that 93 per cent of data hacks take place in under a few minutes. And in 83 per cent of compromises, the time taken for a data breach to be discovered is measured in weeks – or longer.
Hacking: the risks.
Is this just a fact of online business life, yet another hassle that realistically won’ t be dealt with until it becomes a problem?
The central message of this article is that a laissezfaire attitude is no longer viable. Law changes due to be implemented in May 2018 place heavy legal obligations on businesses to be proactive about hacking.
The law has developed in proportion to the risk of hacking. The risk is enormous: according to the new UK hacking watchdog, the National Cyber Security Centre, each home in the UK has an average of eight internet devices.
With the growth of the Internet of Things, home appliances are increasingly internet based and therefore vulnerable to hacking.
The NCSC reports that 83 per cent of UK businesses are online, and that 65 per cent of
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