A lot of ICT security musings don’t take into account that before being “ICT”, security is first “security”. This means that in designing a strategy, the “security architect” should know the basic meaning of the word: preventing threats and, in case the worst happens, terminate the threat as fast and ruthlessly as possible. Continue reading “On Killing (A disturbing attitude on ICT Security)”
No More Mandatory Data Retention in Italy? – Update
As a consequence of the Parliament/Govern inactivity, the huge quantity of traffic data that survived the June, 30 midnight – and that some ISP might still have in its own hand, maybe hoping for a last-minute, never passed, prorogation – is currently being deleted.
Right now, traffic-Database deleting schedules should have been re-set to the old standard: one year retention period as set forth by sec. 132 of the Italian Data Protection Act.
And the Data Protection Authority still hasn’t hissed a word.
No More Data Retention in Italy?
Yesterday the Internet Traffic Mandatory Data Retention regulation expired without being re-enacted by the Parliament. This means that at the midnight of June, 30, all the Italian Telcos and ISPs just (or should have) deleted last year Internet usage information from their databases.
Maybe the Parliament and the Data Protection Authority just had a strike of consciousness and decided so, after having “forgotten” for years to stress test the national data retention legislation to check if it could still stands against the EU Court of justice 2014 decision that bashed the data-retention directive.
Or, maybe, the powers-that-be just forgot about the data-retention.
We’ll never know for sure, but fact is that current high profile criminal investigations are now deprived of an important information gathering tool.
AntiPublic, British Airways and the Italian Data Protection Supervisor
Italy just discovered AntiPublic, the next data-leak with about half a million of personal accounts made publicly available by the lack of care of “trusted” websites in handling its “security measures”.
British Airways got a shut down of its IT infrastructure due, according to the Italian newspaper Repubblica.it, a lack of management of the business continuity plan.
This two cases, while unrelated, are both evidence of an infringement of the EU Data Protection Directive (95/46/CE).
In the AntiPublic data-leak the reason why is obvious, as it should be for the British Airways IT infrastructure “freeze”: business continuity, indeed, is one of the security measures that the Data Processor should enforce to avoid damages arising from the unavailability of personal data.
This is a challenge for the (Italian) Data Protection Supervisor. He can either look elsewhere, or open an investigation to ascertain what happened and who is the culprit of these personal data mismanagement.
The EU Directive 95/46 and his own case law? give the Italian Data Protection Supervisor the power to act even outside the national and European jurisdictions,? so there wouldn’t be a motive no to start an investigation.
So, if the Italian Data Protection Authority will actually starts poking around to find out the “truth”, then a message is sent to the business and civil servant community: we don’t need to wait for the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) to enter into force, to exercise our prerogatives against no matter who.
Should he, on the contrary, look elsewhere, the message would have a very different meaning. Citizen, companies and public services might be led to think that all the “early warnings” about the upcoming GDPR and the dire consequences of the non compliance are just a pre-emptive notice of some sort of “hidden tax payment through fines” approach, targeted against SME, some big Italian company and a couple of USA multinationals.)
In the meantime, AntiPublic & C shall continue to access unnoticed our personal data, while citizen will continue paying the consequences (in term of damages and lack of services) of the poor compliance to a set of provisions that, just yet, are felt as useless bureaucratic burden.
When Security Becomes Service Disruption: the Banca Popolare di Bari Case
The message reads: For security reasons, this ATM doesn’t provide cash between Friday, 16,30 and Monday, 09,00. We are sorry for the inconvenience.
This way of looking at IT Security reminds me of those Security “Managers” who were use to advise to unplug the Ethernet cable at the daily close of business, to put it back the very next day.
Security can’t be a way to make the customers’ life more miserable. The challenge of a Security Manager is exactly the opposite: let customers doing their business while keeping the environment safe.