Privacy threats and vulnerabilities: Reinvent your privacy engineering practices and win

Abstract

The ever-changing paradigm of data generation, storage and consumption has led to the exponential growth in data incidents. The year 2021 has been the year of highest data breaches exposing personal information of millions of users. The root cause of these data breaches ranges from vulnerabilities in unprotected databases, misconfigurations in cloud systems, ransomware, malware or slip from marketing service providers. Most organisations have strong privacy organisational functions that are compliance-focused; however, they lack privacy engineering functions focused on embedding privacy into the engineering practices. This paper makes recommendations about privacy engineering best practices that can help prevent, detect and mitigate privacy threats and vulnerabilities and provides information about appropriate privacy and security controls to mitigate the privacy risks. It also provides a practice lab section which serves as a practical playground to apply the above concepts.