SUMMARY:
In
this episode, Joh Harvey, the founder of health food delivery service and café the Raw Store shares his experience of being the victim of a cyber-attack. It resulted in several of his clients being defrauded, despite the fact he did not store card details on his website. With cyber-attacks increasing in both frequency and sophistication, Joh hopes his story could help other small businesses protect their data – and clients - from opportunistic hackers. Please excuse the traffic noise, we recorded this in the Raw Store’s bustling headquarters, which is on a busy road.
KEY POINTS:
- Data minimisation is a key part of Guernsey’s data protection legislation and Joh had been particularly careful to only collect basic information from customers. “From a data protection perspective entering into this, I was very keenly aware of not keeping unnecessary details for our customers. I think it’s a really important trust element between you and your customer to only keep the details you need.”
- Despite being meticulous with the type of personal information he held; Joh had inadvertently left himself vulnerable to attack through his open-source website provider. “I found out one day after being contacted by the police that several people who had brought food from us had had money taken out of their accounts.”
- Hackers were able to skim the card details of his customers as they placed their orders online, even though their credit card details were not stored by the company. “The biggest surprise was that we had used a third-party payment provider in order to minimize or as I thought eliminate the risk of having people’s card details being stolen because we didn’t hold any of that, it being a big risk best to avoid rather than put your customers at risk. It turns out hackers are really quite clever and that doesn’t protect you at all…at the time it’s rather shocking for customers to have to go through that.”
- The number of cyber incidents rose sharply during 2022, a trend which looks likely to continue.
BIO
Joh Harvey founded the Raw Store in 2015. It is a healthy, wholefood café in St Peter Port, Guernsey.
&
Indulge