The top Capital One security officer is moving to a new role in the wake of the bank’s data breach, a spokesperson confirmed to The Hill.

The reshuffling comes in the months after the bank revealed that a hacker retained access to the data of existing customers and those who had applied for credit cards, with The Wall Street Journal reporting that approximately 106 million people were affected. An outside researcher tipped off Capital One 127 days after the hacker first tried to breach the company.

Thousands of California drivers had their Social Security numbers exposed in a data breach that gave federal agencies unauthorized access, the California Department of Motor Vehicles (DMV) announced Tuesday, according to a report.

Equifax is set to pay out as much as $700 million in a settlement after millions of people’s data — including in Canada — was breached in 2017. Equifax was hit by a major hack in 2017 that exposed the information of as many as 143 million Americans and 8,000 Canadians. The company said at the time that criminals had penetrated the data by exploiting an application between mid-May and July that year.

Data breach affects more than 40% of Quebec-based credit union's clients and members. An employee with "ill-intention" at Desjardins Group collected information about nearly three million people and businesses and shared it with others outside the Quebec-based financial institution. The leaked information includes names, addresses, birth dates, social insurance numbers, email addresses and information about transaction habits.

Companies purchased 159 drives at random on eBay, a mix of hard drives and flash (SSD) drives. After applying data recovery tools to those drives, they found that 42% of them had at least some data. Even more concerning, about three out of every 20 of the drives had personally identifiable information, including scanned images of passports and birth certificates, as well as financial records.

An amendment to New Jersey’s data breach notification requirements of the Consumer Fraud Act, if signed into law as expected, will expand the definition of personal information to include “user name, email address, or any other account holder identifying information, in combination with any password or security question and answer that would permit access to an online account.” In turn, it would require businesses to notify consumers of online account security breaches – thereby eliminating a business’s ability, under the current law, to avoid notifying consumers when there is a breach of online information.

There was no shortage of talking points on data protection in 2018, from concerns over data risk and compliance requirements to the challenges of operational complexities. When we surveyed some of the most prominent trends and themes from the last year, three topics stood out among the many facets of these core cybersecurity challenges: regulatory compliance, data breach protection and risk management.

The CNIL, the French data protection watchdog, has issued its first GDPR fine of $57 million (€50 million). The regulatory body claims that Google has failed to comply with the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) when new Android users set up a new phone and follow Android’s onboarding process.

The LTO program introduced a new capability with LTO 8 tape drives: the ability to write 9 TB (native) on a brand new LTO Ultrium 7 cartridge instead of 6 TB (native) as specified by the LTO 7 format. Such a cartridge is called an LTO Type M cartridge.

By 2025, tape transfer rates are predicted to be five times faster than HDDs. Since tape capacity continually grows with the expanding need for data storage, many companies are choosing tape because it is not only the safest means for data protection but also the most affordable.

Equifax Canada has revised the number of Canadians caught up in a massive data breach earlier this year, saying an investigation has found that more than 19,000 were affected.  The company says an investigation has revealed that the credit card records contain names, addresses, credit or debit card numbers, expiry dates and Social Insurance Numbers.

After a third party contractor mis-configured the settings of an Amazon.com cloud storage product, almost 50,000 Australians had their salaries and passwords exposed, in the countries second largest data breach.

"Every company in every sector" in Canada should be doing more to protect themselves from data breaches, according to the experts interviewed in this recent article.