News
COMMENT: 110,000 gun owners in the UK having their personal data leaked
September 2021 by Matt Aldridge, Lead Solutions Consultant at Webroot
This morning The Telegraph reported on 110,000 gun owners in the UK having their personal data leaked. This includes personal information such as phone numbers, email addresses and even coordinates that can be cross checked to find people’s home addresses. The comment from Matt Aldridge, Lead Solutions Consultant at Webroot, on the matter and what businesses can do to ensure that their data is protecteding.
This case highlights the importance of thoroughly assessing the exposure risk of data assets within your business or organisation. Once an in-depth assessment has been made, there should be a clear justification for deploying high quality processes and tools to securely protect any high-risk datasets from exfiltration and loss, as well as to detect attacks against such data.
Here we see that the personal details and locations of 110,000 gun owners has been lost to the dark web, and then manipulated for use by groups or individuals who take issue with the use of weapons against animals. It is not a big leap to anticipate potential use of this data for targeted weapons theft by organised criminal groups, so this breach could have serious physical security implications in addition to the more direct cybersecurity ones.
As with any data breach, there are always lessons that can be learned. In this case regular independent penetration testing may have helped to secure the data, regular security awareness training may have helped to detect breach attempts or to spot weaknesses in corporate defences, and a more comprehensive cyber defence strategy, toolset and services suite could have prevented the breach or detected it quickly enough that the loss or damage could be reduced. We also always recommend a comprehensive backup strategy, securely retaining data at multiple locations to allow for swift recovery when necessary.
