US education software company exposed personal data of 1.2M students

SmarterSelect, a U.S.-based company that provides software for managing the application process for scholarships, exposed the personal data of thousands of applicants because of a misconfigured Google Cloud Storage bucket. The data spill, discovered by cybersecurity company UpGuard, contained 1.5 terabytes of data collected by a number of programs that offer financial support to students. […]

Arctic Wolf acquires ‘Hollywood-style’ cybersecurity training startup Habitu8

Arctic Wolf, a managed cybersecurity company that offers a “security operations-as-a-concierge” service, has acquired Habitu8, a security training and awareness content platform. Terms of the deal — which comes just two months after Arctic Wolf secured $150 million in Series F funding — were not announced, but a person with knowledge of the matter told […]

After years of inaction against adtech, UK’s ICO calls for browser-level controls to fix ‘cookie fatigue’

In the latest quasi-throwback toward ‘do not track‘, the UK’s data protection chief has come out in favor of a browser- and/or device-level setting to allow Internet users to set “lasting” cookie preferences — suggesting this as a fix for the barrage of consent pop-ups that continues to infest websites in the region. European web […]

SEC fines brokerage firms over email hacks that exposed client data

The U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission has fined several brokerage firms a total of $750,000 for exposing the sensitive personally identifiable information of thousands of customers and clients after hackers took over employee email accounts. A total of eight entities belonging to three companies have been sanctioned by the SEC, including Cetera (Advisor Networks, Investment […]

UK names John Edwards as its choice for next data protection chief as gov’t eyes watering down privacy standards

The UK government has named the person it wants to take over as its chief data protection watchdog, with sitting commissioner Elizabeth Denham overdue to vacate the post: The Department of Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) today said its preferred replacement is New Zealand’s privacy commissioner, John Edwards. Edwards, who has a legal background, […]