News & Thoughts from the Axenic Team
As I’m sure many of you are aware, the New Zealand Privacy Act 2020 came into effect on the first of December last year.
In this blog, we’re going to give you a quick rundown of the changes that have been made to the Privacy Act, and how they might affect you. While this isn’t an exhaustive list, it should hopefully cover the most substantial changes.
Being the grinches that we are we thought that instead of giving you a gift this Christmas we’d give you a warning! You’ll get a lot of messages over the next few days and weeks wishing you season’s greetings. Amongst them though, will be well-wishers with more sinister motives. My family has already received a scam SMS: it told us we had a package with an outstanding duty payment on it (of $2) and we just needed to follow the link to pay the amount and release our package. This is pretty typical of delivery scams that many kiwis are receiving at the moment. Luckily we had a bit of skepticism and a handy cybersecurity expert to seek advice from!
It seems like everyone is talking about applying artificial intelligence and machine learning to security data, if you believe the hype you’d think that all you need to do is install a vendor’s product, and hey presto your problems are solved. My experiments with a manic depressive chatbot showed me that perhaps, it’s a bit more complicated than that!
The new Privacy Act comes into effect today (1st of December 2020) so it’s a great time to make sure you understand your new obligations. Being on top of these changes allows you to remain compliant and do the right thing by the people you hold data on. So we’d like to remind you about some tools and resources we’ve found useful.
Sometimes I think my cybersecurity colleagues believe they are living in a spy novel. I mean, we are all guilty of trying to make our day jobs sound more interesting or trying to make them sound more ‘sexy’, but this industry in particular takes the cake. Even the name “cybersecurity” is like “oooh, I work in a William Gibson novel!” Though we can’t fault someone trying to make their job sound better than “security guard at an online shopping mall”.
