IT Governance Blog on IT governance, risk management, compliance and information security.

In a speech at the Infosec security conference last week, the deputy Information Commissioner, David Smith, said that the NHS reported the highest number of serious data breaches of any UK organisation since the end of 2007.

The NHS – the UK’s largest employer with 1.7m staff reported 287 breaches it in the period, accounting for more than 30% of the total number of reported breaches. Most of the breaches (113) were the result of stolen data or hardware, followed by 82 cases of lost data or hardware.

Skewed Results

Mr Smith said the problems were not confined to the public sector and that results could be skewed because the public sector has a culture of reporting all breaches whereas not all private sector firms did.

Currently the reporting procedure for data breaches in the UK is voluntary although the ICO is “moving towards” a compulsory system. In April the ICO introduced fines of up to £500,000 for serious data breaches.

Find out more about the new powers of the ICO >>

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Tags: Data Protection Act, DPA, ITGP

This entry was posted on Thursday, May 6th, 2010 at 9:28 am and is filed under Data Breaches. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.