Weekly News Highlights | WHSmith hacked, YouTube accused of collecting children's data, cyber attacks from China on the rise

March 6th

WHSmith hacked

British high street staple, WHSmith, has become the latest high profile victim of a cyber attack.

The retailer revealed that attacks had accessed company data, including data of current and former employees. In a statement, WHSmith said:

"Upon becoming aware of the incident, we immediately launched an investigation, engaged specialist support services and implemented our incident response plans, which included notifying the relevant authorities."

All affected staff had also been notified and steps taken to support them.

Read more here.

YouTube accused of collecting children's data

A campaigner has accused YouTube of breaching UK data privacy codes and collecting the viewing data of children under 13.

Campaigners have pointed out that YouTube doesn't do enough to protect children from having their data collected if they are accessing YouTube through family devices not registered as children. They argue that this lapse is violating the 'ICO children's code' introduced by the Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) in 2020.

YouTube was fined $170m by a US regulator in 2019 for violating children's privacy laws and face more large fines if they are found to be breaching the ICO children's code as well.

Read more here.

Cyber attacks from China are on the rise

CrowdStrike's annual Global Threat Report has revealed a rising number of cyber attacks targeting personal data linked to China.

They report that while malware activity is dropping, there has been a noticeable increase in hands-on social engineering attacks. Adam Meyers, the head of intelligence at CrowdStrike had this to say:

“The feared threats of the Russia-Ukraine conflict masked more sinister and successful traction by a growing number of China-nexus adversaries [...] Today’s threat actors are smarter, more sophisticated, and more well resourced than they have ever been in the history of cyber security."