Data recently released to the public by Alberta’s Office of the Information and Privacy Commissioner (OIPC) shows an increasing trend of online data breaches, phishing, and social engineering ploys that compromise the personal information of hundreds of thousands of Albertans annually.
OIPC’s report comes after the recent data dump suffered by Calgary’s Cowboys Casino, wherein hackers who had stolen data from the establishment a year ago shared sensitive customer data online on Sunday. The hackers have threatened to divulge even more customer data in the coming weeks if the casino fails to improve its security by then.
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“In any given year, hundreds of thousands of Albertans are being impacted by things like this,” said Alberta privacy commissioner Jill Clayton. “We’ve seen a huge increase in the hacking of e-commerce websites, malware, social engineering. We read about these things but we’re seeing much more of it.”
In 2010, Alberta passed legislation that required private sector organizations to report any privacy breach that could pose “a real risk of significant harm” to individuals; it was the first province to require such jurisdictions.
Since then, the province’s privacy office has been busy identifying and notifying the public of data breaches. The OIPC, as of May 31, has made 65 public notifications of privacy breaches, 31 of which were attributed to some form of illegal attempt to electronically secure information, typically by unknown third parties.
An analysis of OIPC’s 2017 data to date shows that the personal information of over 220,000 Albertans has been compromised due to cyberattacks. By comparison, in all of 2016, over 314,000 Albertans suffered from a data breach.
Previously, the OPIC would deal with information breaches from incorrectly-transmitted faxes or emails, or even from misplaced electronic storage devices. The rise of online hacking incidents, however, gave the privacy office more reasons to worry.
“If you can hack into an e-commerce site with 100,000, 200,000 or even a million customer accounts, that’s a lot of information,” Clayton told Calgary Herald. “When we see these breach notifications come in, we can almost see what are the popular lines of attack — right now it’s very much social engineering and e-commerce websites being compromised.”
With online breaches becoming more prominent and frequent, the OPIC is set to have its hands full with hacking concerns in the years to come. Clayton pointed out that in 2016-17, her office saw a 70% increase in the privacy breach files it handles compared to just five years ago.
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