Christmas Incorporated, the enormous organisation in charge of all Christmas gift deliveries worldwide, recently contacted Phishing Tackle (us) over fears of a possible data breach.
They were concerned over the amount of phishing emails they had received and that one of their databases had been breached.
After Phishing Tackle performed a thorough investigation we broke the news to them that they had unfortunately been subject to a somewhat enormous data breach. In fact it was about as catastrophic as one could imagine.
Hackers had gained access to the Naughty & Nice list.
The data breach made national news, a clip can be found here:
This exposed the personal records, including Names, Dates of birth, Gender, Addresses, and Naughty or Nice classification. The list contained the details of over 7.75 billion users, making it the largest data breach in history.
As such, upon a further investigation by the Information Commissioners Office (ICO) they deemed Christmas Inc to be accountable and fined them in accordance with their data breach policies.
Usually, they model maximum fines according to 4% of annual turnover but in the case of Christmas Inc they used 4% of their average annual gift value, creating the largest fine in history at just over £25 billion, more than 136x the size of the British Airways fine of £183 million, which held the previous record.
*Graph not to scale as it was simply too large
The news team managed to get an exclusive interview with the CEO of the corporation, Santa Claus.
“We’d been meaning to educate our elves on cyber security, but we hadn’t realised how high a priority it was…”
“I’m now jolly concerned we won’t recover from this. There isn’t much Ho-Ho-Hoing goin on around here”
Santa Claus – Founder & CEO, Christmas Incorporated
Whether Christmas Inc. does manage to recover we will have to wait and see, for now though the message is clear;
Leaving Security Awareness Training as a low priority can have catastrophic results on your business. When you compare the cost of a data breach vs the cost of the training, the ROI is simply immeasurably attractive.
By training your users to spot phishing emails using simple software, like that provided by Phishing Tackle, you can reduce your organisation’s cyber threat surface by up to 90% at minimal cost.
Have a look at our Free Click-Prone® Test to find out how many of your elves might be the cause of a not-so-merry Christmas.
