ICO

The Information Commissioner's Office, the UK’s independent regulator for data protection and information rights, says more than half of cyber attacks and data breaches in schools and colleges in the past three years were carried out by pupils.

Of the 215 hacks and breaches in educational establishments investigated by the ICO in that period, 57 percent of them were perpetrated by students.

New analysis by CybSafe of data from the UK Information Commissioner's Office shows 80 percent of data breaches reported in 2021 were caused by user error.

A total of 2,692 reports were sent to the ICO last year 80 percent of which could be attributed to actions taken by end-users, though this is down from 90 percent in 2020.

There has been a spate of bans on cryptocurrency ads in recent months, but Facebook has had something of a change of heart and has decided that some such ads are permissible on its platform.

It is important to note that this is just a relaxation of the ban Facebook introduced back in January, not a complete lifting of it. There are various caveats here, including the fact that advertisers will have to be "pre-approved".

When GDPR comes into force next week, organizations will have 72 hours to report security breaches to a regulator once they become aware of them.

Ahead of the new legislation, the UK's Information Commissioner's Office (ICO) has released details of the latest data security trends. Reported incidents in the final quarter of 2017 showed a 17 percent increase over the previous quarter, perhaps indicating that companies are taking a more proactive approach to reporting as GDPR approaches.

Bitcoin and other cryptocurrencies may be set to face more scrutiny from law authorities following a landmark case in the US.

The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has raised its first ICO-related lawsuit, charging businessman Maksim Zaslavskiy with fraudulently running two initial coin offerings (ICOs).

There is a boom in initial coin offerings (ICOs) in 2017, where firms are mainly offering in-app tokens for investors. These arrangements only work in a given ecosystem and represent companies that are trying hard to not offer "securities" due to the SEC, regulations, etc.

Many firms have taken in funds through ICOs that are far more than their true value and with such a supply of offerings, the quality of the typical ICO event has dropped precipitously. ICOs work as a crowdfunding tool where a percentage of the newly issued currency is provided to new investors in exchange for traditional money or a different cryptocurrency such as Bitcoin. In response to this unregulated and seemingly out of control market, the Chinese authorities recently banned ICOs to slow down the market while regulations can be enacted.

In an alarming but long-feared move, Chinese authorities announced on September 4, 2017, that from then on fundraising Initial Coin Offerings (ICOs) will not be allowed to take place on the domestic market. ICO technology can be used as a tool to collect funds from backers to launch new blockchain projects.

The Chinese regulators instructed companies that have already completed their fundraising ICOs to refund the payments to their backers, and the public and financial institutions are asked to report to the authorities all suspicious fundraising activities involving ICOs and cryptocurrencies. Naturally, this development threw the Chinese blockchain community into disarray.

Let me start by sharing that I am positioned on both sides of the market. In the last six months I participated in implementing nearly a dozen ICO projects (both as part of ICOBox and as a private advisor), and as a token holder I contributed to over 40 projects (both as a private actor and as a consultant to institutional token buyers). This is the foundation of my expertise in the field.

In this article we will be discussing ICOs and tokens, so let me give you a few numbers which will partly explain what we are doing here.