Misc

GDPR and Pseudonymisation – Easing the Pain of Regulation

27 April 2016 marked a turning point for a lot of countries as well as a lot businesses worldwide: EU regulation 2016/679 (going by it’s more widely known name General Data Protection Regulation and abbreviated GDPR) was adopted by the European Parliament, the Council as well as the Commission [1]. Especially readers from countries outside of the EU might ask “Why should this be of interest for me?”.

The point is: if your business is dealing with data of EU citizens (e.g. because you are having an online shop selling goods in the EU, or you operate a social network platform with customers that are EU citizens) you are liable under GDPR – this is regulated in Article 3, section 2 of the regulation: “This Regulation applies to the processing of personal data of data subjects residing in the Union by a controller not established in the Union, where the processing activities are related to:
(a) the offering of goods or services to such data subjects in the Union; or
(b) the monitoring of their behaviour.”
I’d guess that if you are reading these lines you become aware (if not have been so before) that your business might most probably be affected by GDPR as well. Now, the purpose of this blog post is not to enlighten you on the basics of GDPR but to discuss one special, interesting aspect of this regulation: pseudonymisation and how it might support your way to become compliant with GDPR.

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Misc

(Mostly) New, Interesting, and Security-focused Open Source Projects

Troopers ’17 – the 10th edition – madness is over and hopefully all of you are well rested and recovered after this special week. Of course the rest of the world did not stand still and thus Google lifted the curtains on a new public portal collecting and promoting the Open Source Software projects developed by employees of Google: opensource.google.com. There are a lot of interesting projects that might incubate new interesting developments. And even security oriented tools and projects (51 at the time of writing to be precise) are publically available [1].

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Events

Unpatchable – Living with a vulnerable implanted device

TL;DR: Marie Moe talked about security issues of medical devices, especially implantable devices like pacemakers, but not in overwhelming technological depth. She wanted to point out the necessity of intensified security research in the field of medical devices as vendors and medical personnel seem to be lacking necessary awareness of security of devices, interfaces, services, and even data privacy.”Get involved, join the cavalry” was her core message.

Lub-Dub-Lub-Dub-Lub-Dub
Marie started her talk with the sound of a repeating heartbeat. First she introduced how she came up with the topic of her talk: Marie relies on a pacemaker herself andsince she got it implanted she was curious how secure this little device might be. A minimum education of the auditorium followed including an explanation how a human heart works and what a pacemaker does.

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