Peter A Clarke

The UK Information Commissioner’s Office (“ICO”)has fine British Airways (BA) £20 million for a data breach in 2018.  I did a post on it in September 2018. The ICO initially intended to fine BA nearly £184 million and made a statement in July 2019 to that effect in response to BA’s statement to the London Stock Exchange.  The Commissioner decided to reduce the sum in light of the impact COVID 19 has had on BA’s business and finances.

As often happens the investigation into the cyber attack by the regulator turned up multiple failings by BA in both protecting its network but also failing to detect the attack. And that attack was both wide and deep in its penetration. Through the attack addresses of 244,000 customers were accessed, the credit card details with CVV numbers of 77,000 customers and credit card numbers only of 108,000 customers.

The media release gives an excellent summary. The much more comprehensive Penalty Notice is found here.  It, the parts that are not redacted, provides somber reading. 

While the fine is high by UK standards it is relatively modest by US standards where the Federal Trade Commission regularly imposes fines in the tens of millions, sometimes hundreds of millions and recently in the case of Facebook US$5 billion.  In Australia enforcement is weak and fitful and penalties are yet to occur under the civil penalty provisions,  The determinations give rise to risable penalties.  The enforcement in Australias is more illusory than actual.

The ICO media release provides:

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has fined British Airways (BA) £20m for failing to protect the personal and financial details of more than 400,000 of its customers.

An ICO investigation found the airline was processing a significant amount of personal data without adequate security measures in place. This failure broke data protection law and, subsequently, BA was the subject of a cyber-attack during 2018, which it did not detect for more than two months.

ICO investigators found BA ought to have identified weaknesses in its security and resolved them with security measures that were available at the time.

Addressing these security issues would have prevented the 2018 cyber-attack being carried out in this way, investigators concluded.

Information Commissioner Elizabeth Denham said: “People entrusted their personal details to BA and BA failed to take adequate measures to keep those details secure.

“Their failure to act was unacceptable and affected hundreds of thousands of people, which may have caused some anxiety and distress as a result. That’s why we have issued BA with a £20m fine – our biggest to date.

“When organisations take poor decisions around people’s personal data, that can have a real impact on people’s lives. The law now gives us the tools to encourage businesses to make better decisions about data, including investing in up-to-date security.”

Because the BA breach happened in June 2018, before the UK left the EU, the ICO investigated on behalf of all EU authorities as lead supervisory authority under the GDPR. The penalty and action have been approved by the other EU DPAs through the GDPR’s cooperation process.

In June 2019 the ICO issued BA with a notice of intent to fine. As part of the regulatory process the ICO considered both representations from BA and the economic impact of COVID-19 on their business before setting a final penalty.

Details of the cyber attack

The attacker is believed to have potentially accessed the personal data of approximately 429,612 customers and staff. This included names, addresses, payment card numbers and CVV numbers of 244,000 BA customers.

Other details thought to have been accessed include the combined card and CVV numbers of 77,000 customers and card numbers only for 108,000 customers.

Usernames and passwords of BA employee and administrator accounts as well as usernames and PINs of up to 612 BA Executive Club accounts were also potentially accessed.

Failure to prevent the attack

There were numerous measures BA could have used to mitigate or prevent the risk of an attacker being able to access the BA network. These include:

• • limiting access to applications, data and tools to only that which are required to fulfil a user’s role
  • undertaking rigorous testing, in the form of simulating a cyber-attack, on the business’ systems;
  • protecting employee and third party accounts with multi-factor authentication.

Additional mitigating measures BA could have used are listed in the penalty notice.

None of these measures would have entailed excessive cost or technical barriers, with some available through the Microsoft Operating System used by BA. 

Since the attack, BA has made considerable improvements to its IT security.

Lack of awareness of the attack

ICO investigators found that BA did not detect the attack on 22 June 2018 themselves but were alerted by a third party more than two months afterwards on 5 September. Once they became aware BA acted promptly and notified the ICO.

It is not clear whether or when BA would have identified the attack themselves. This was considered to be a severe failing because of the number of people affected and because any potential financial harm could have been more significant.

The highlights, if that is the appropriate word, of the notice is:

 

 

 

As invariably happens the publication of the penalty notice has resulted in extensive negative coverage with stories such as UK’s ICO reduces British Airways data breach fine to £20M, after originally setting it at £184M, BBC’s report British Airways fined £20m over data breach and the Guardian’s BA fined record £20m for customer data breach.