Irish businesses will have to cough up for new data protection officers thanks to EU laws coming down the tracks, according to the Irish data protection commissioner.

Speaking to the Irish Independent, Helen Dixon said that the General Data Protection Regulation will be a "wake up call" for Irish organisations which do not currently have such facilities in place.

Ms Dixon said that dozens of foreign-based tech companies had recently been in touch with her office over data compliance responsibilities after a potential move to Ireland.

The GDPR is one of a number of data and security issues to be discussed at Dublin InfoSec 2016 today. The RDS conference, which includes talks by Wikileaks journalist Sarah Harrison and cyber psychologist Mary Aiken, will focus on topics ranging from how to survive being hacked to ransomware attacks and responding to data breaches.

Breaches

The conference is being held as news of one of the world's biggest data breaches broke last night. Over 400 million email addresses and passwords from the adult-themed dating network 'Adult Friend Finder' were exposed, with tens of thousands of Irish email addresses said to be included in the breach.

Meanwhile, Ms Dixon said that it would be a matter of months before the Irish data regulator's office knows whether, or to what extent, Yahoo can be held accountable for its recent data breach that affected over 500 million email users.

"We're in daily contact and in constant activity," she said.

"That is the subject of significant activity for the office and is in fact a scenario that is changing day by day in terms of the information that we're gathering."

Last week, Yahoo filed a document with US authorities revealing that some staff knew of the data breach as far back as 2014. The company, which only admitted the massive breach in September of this year, has claimed that the meltdown was caused by state-sponsored hackers.

Irish Independent