Data Breach Lawyers | GDPR Breach

Our data breach response lawyers assist clients with various types and severities of data breaches, some of which have occurred on a cross-jurisdictional basis and some of which have been caused by the organisation’s service providers. A personal data breach is a breach of security leading to the accidental or unlawful destruction, loss, alteration, unauthorised disclosure of, or access to, personal data. For the data protection rules to apply, the breach must relate to personal data as opposed to purely commercial data, which does not relate to individuals.

The data breach must be caused by a breach of security and does not include all “non-compliant processing” (e.g. a company might be breaching the data protection rules by processing data without a privacy notice, but this does not mean it has had a ‘personal data breach’). This links to the requirement that your organisation has appropriate technical and organisational measures in place to protect personal data. The breach can be caused by an accident (such as sending an e-mail to the wrong recipient) or a deliberate act which is unlawful (e.g. allowing another organisation to access your CRM system without informing the relevant individuals).

Types of personal data breach

There are three main types of security breach:

confidentiality breaches (disclosure of, or access to, personal data), including providing personal information to someone that should not have access to it;

integrity breaches (alteration of personal data), including data becoming corrupt and irrecoverable; and

availability breaches (loss of access to, or destruction of, personal data), such as when paper records are lost due to flooding and there are no back-up copies.

Do you suspect a personal data breach?

If you suspect a personal data breach (whether caused by you or someone else), you should tell the relevant persons within your organisation immediately. Those responsible for managing the response to the breach should contain, minimise and mitigate the breach, including making a recovery plan where relevant, and preserve all evidence relating to the potential breach.

Communicating a personal data breach

Those responsible for managing the response to the breach should also assess if the ICO, data subjects or any other parties require to be notified, and consider the message being issued to your stakeholders. Record the details of the breach is a legal requirement, and you should evaluate and share your learning within your organisation to ensure it does not happen again.

Notifying the ICO

We can assist you in evaluating whether the breach is notifiable to the ICO and preparing the appropriate notification. We can also help you to understand whether the breach needs to be notified to affected data subjects, and to draft clear communications informing them of the breach, including creating FAQ documents for customers and other affected data subjects to help manage the questions they may have following a breach.

Policies & procedures

If you have a notifiable personal data breach, you have 72 hours from becoming aware of the breach to inform the ICO. A procedure outlining the process for dealing with a breach will enable your staff to act quickly, and we can assist with preparing and implementing personal data breach policies and procedures within your organisation.

Good governance

The best step in preventing a breach is to have appropriate security measures in place from the outset, including having in place good data governance by way of policies, procedures and training. We can help your organisation to identify what policies it needs, prepare and implement those policies, and provide tailored training sessions to staff on the meaning of those policies and how these operate in practice.

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