An employee data breach- victims and wrongdoers

In an employee data breach, the impact to both the employers and the employees can be severe, due to the long-term damage which the exposure of data can provoke.

Employees represent a two-sided data protection risk to businesses: on the one hand, employees can be responsible for the ‘human error’ data breaches that plague our headlines, or they could themselves be the victims at the centre of a data breach.

As such, an internal, employee data breach could be no less damaging to a company’s reputation and expenses than a customer data breach, so employee data protection should never be taken lightly. In terms of the Virgin Media data breach, this is a pivotal factor to consider.

Employees and ‘human error’ data breaches

All too often, we have seen anonymous employees at the root of large-scale company data breaches, where a simple ‘human error’ has exposed hundreds, thousands or millions of customer details, with varying degrees of culpability. The mass email mistake has become all too common; the cause of several high-profile data breaches has involved one employee neglecting or forgetting to anonymise the recipients in a group email, meaning that every single recipient can view all the names and email addresses.

Our Virgin Media Group Action is a data breach that can fall into the category of a “human error” data breach, where the personal data of 900,000 Virgin Media customers was left vulnerable to unauthorised access after an employee failed to secure the relevant database. However, in cases such as this, the responsibility for the data breach ultimately falls to the company.

Claiming compensation for the Virgin Media data breach

You can start your No Win, No Fee case as a victim of the Virgin Media data breach using our simple sign-up process here.

As a firm of expert lawyers with a great deal of experience in data breach claims and Group Action cases, it is the mission of Your Lawyers to hold large corporations to account. The Virgin Media action is only the latest in a series of companies which we have taken legal action against.

The other side: the effects of an employee data breach

In cases of an employee data breach in which the employees are the victims, the negative effects can be significant and wide-reaching.

It isn’t nice to fall foul of a data breach at any time but, when it is in your role at a company, the impact can be more severe. It is not just about personal data being exposed that might involve you, but also the wider impact for the company that you work for as well.

As for the effects on the companies, the loss of employees’ usernames and passwords could provide criminals with access to private internal information. Moreover, the legal risks of an employee data breach should not be underestimated; if employers fail to respond appropriately to the breach, employees could launch a group data breach action to obtain compensation, a reaction that would undoubtedly prompt unwanted headlines about the company.

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