Islington data leak follows public sector security concerns

A second data leak from Islington Council has seen the information of 2,400 residents released online.

Responding to a Freedom of Information (FOI) request, town hall officers unintentionally provided website What Do They Know? with the private data of a series of residents, including names, addresses, relationship statuses, ethnicity and sexual preference.

The dossier of information was automatically published online, remaining fully accessible to the public for 19 days and being accessed, according to Islington Council, seven times.

This follows a further information leak by the authority in April, when individuals facing ejection from an estate were provided with the names and phone numbers of the 51 residents that had lodged complaints against them.

A new poll from ComRes has also revealed that over half of public sector employees are not taking precautions to protect private, confidential and sensitive information from being seen by other parties.

The poll supports research carried out by Secure for a recently published White Paper on Visual Data Security, which revealed 82% of IT security professionals had little or no confidence that their organisation’s employees had taken steps to protect information.

Brian Honan, author of the Secure White Paper, said that: ‘with the frequency and innovative nature of data attacks rising, organisations must ensure that the defences they have in place protect against all potential data breaches and not just some. All organisations have an obligation to both their employees and customers to be as secure as they possibly can be.’