The Data Protection Act Is Not Worth The Paper It Is Written On

What is data protection and why is it important?

The increasing popularity of Internet brings us to a world of dilemmas. Pros of using it are well known, but there are many cons that diminish them. Some problems appeared in the last few decades and there is an urgent need to introduce legislation devoted to law and social issues taking into consideration this powerful medium. The times when hackers where breaching security systems of large corporations and government institutions just for their personal satisfaction faded into the past. Not only the reasons changed. Despite this, the awareness of utmost importance of this matter, people still don’t seam to realise what it brings. Their beliefs in system reliability combined with producers assurance make it even worse.

The new area with development of computer technology appeared to leadership of illegal activity. The majority of essential information e.g. such which are the trade secret of firm, are kept in electronic figure. In such case the safety of informative system can decide about overall opinion of institution, the position on market, or even about financial fluency. Information can be very attractive for competitive firms, or everyone who is able to use it in order to take advantage of them. Interest allows criminal groups to broaden areas of activity. It is noticeable that information system can not only improve company's operating, but it may become a serious threat.

We can safely estimate that nowadays every company, no matter how big it is, uses internet for marketing or communication purposes. It is closely related with our mentality. Even the best protected software and hardware will not do any good if several basic principles are not followed. Those rules are included in Data Protection Act 1998:

1. Personal data shall be processed fairly and lawfully

2. Personal data shall be obtained only for one or more specified and lawful purposes and shall not be further processed in any manner incompatible with those purposes

3. Personal data shall be adequate, relevant and not excessive in relation to the purpose or purposes for which they are processed

4. Personal data shall be accurate and, where necessary, kept up to date

5. Personal data processed for any purpose or purposes shall not be kept for longer than is necessary for that purpose or those purposes

6. Personal data shall be processed in accordance with the rights of data subjects under the act

7. Appropriate technical and organisational measures shall be taken against unauthorised or unlawful processing of personal data and against accidental loss or destruction of, or damage to, personal data.

8. Personal data shall not be transferred to a country or territory outside the European Economic Area, unless that country or territory ensures an adequate level of protection for the rights and freedoms of data subjects in relation to the processing of personal data

Data Protection policies are extremely important, but also subjective due to the fact that every company has different needs and collects data essential (usually) only to provide the most accurate services. Apart from the problem of variety of data which can be collected, it is impossible to develop one perfect solution, panacea, to fix all the issues as the system and hardware configurations can differ. On one side, professional security systems are expensive and not all companies opt for it - on the other side, losses could be even worse especially when customers decide to claim their rights in court.

Classification of the most often stolen data according to Kaspersky Report

Data Internet banking (Citibank, Bank of America, Washington Mutual, Wells Fargo, etc)

Credit/debit card services

Electronic transfers (E*TRADE, Schwab, TD AMERITRADE, PayPal)

Passwords Communicators (ICQ, MSN,)

WebPages (eBay, Amazon.com)

e-mail contact books

Game passwords (World of Warcraft)

In terms of cyber crime we can only take penetration into consideration, as Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) is not aimed to gain any valuable piece of information, but to result in system unavailability or destruction.

Apocalypse Now?

Anticipated increase in cyber crimes

According to Computer Security Institute only two per thousand attacks are being reported publicly. Apparently nothing is going to change, because companies (mainly Corporations) are afraid of losing customers trust and prestige their brand has. The most general threat of all is not outside attack or computer virus. These factors make up less than 10% cases together. The large part of crimes are caused by dishonest workers (10%) and dissatisfied workers (9%). The first ones are often planted by competitive enterprises (so called "rats") or criminal groups. They can take over essential information to pass it forward. The bad conditions of work or lack of perspectives can be motives which lead people to act as "dissatisfied workers”. They pass on or facilitate access of secret information to unauthorized personnel. Well-known story about William Gaede, one of Intel managers who wanted to sell the constructional plans of processor Pentium to the competitive companies . He had the right to access plans, thus he avoided the protections, connecting from home computer and filming the files with plans appearing on computer screen. Luckily, he was arrested while trying to sell these information. This kind of felony is hard to detect because it involves continuous net monitoring and analysis of unusual behaviors. The computer departments usually deal with safety of net, unfortunately - they are short of staff, and maintenance of such system demands total reliability. Therefore, some workers who have basic knowledge about computers install and configure programs, exposing the safety of whole enterprise.

McAfee report shows that keyloggers number (harmful programs saving what we type on keyboard) increased dramatically between 2004 and 2006 reaching the amount of 250%. Data theft became a global issue, threat for everyone regardless of fact is he or she uses a computer or not. (Putting an end…)According to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation annual loses caused by