Greetings from Singapore!

This week, the cost of cyber incidents came into sharp focus again, following the release of a study by Frost & Sullivan, which found that losses from cybersecurity incidents across APAC could amount to U.S. $1.75 trillion, accounting for 7 percent of the region’s gross domestic product. The study also found that a large-sized organization in the APAC region can incur an average of U.S. $30 million in direct and indirect economic losses from a security incident. This underscores the economic and financial impacts cybersecurity incidents can have on an organization and the imperative for organizations to take cyber risks seriously.

Tensions between large technology companies and regulators continue to grow as New Zealand’s privacy commissioner has stated that it would be of “considerable concern” if any organization was unwilling to follow court orders — following reports that New Zealand’s legal fraternity is concerned over certain technology providers not following orders by New Zealand courts to remove suppressed content from online searches. This development reflects the growing unease regulators around the world have with large technology companies, which, despite having significant impacts on society, have largely resisted calls to regulate activity taking place on their platforms.

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Bucking the enforcement trend somewhat is Hong Kong, where Hong Kong’s Office of the Privacy Commissioner for Personal Data recently acknowledged that it had changed its strategy in investigating data breaches — leading to a sharp drop in data breach cases formally investigated by the PCPD from more than 100 in 2014 to just 1 in 2017. Privacy Commissioner Stephen Wong explained the change in strategy as one that places greater emphasis on education and publicity because “prevention is better than cure.” Another explanation could be resourcing constraints, as Wong also confirmed in a written reply to Hong Kong’s South China Morning Post that 30 of the PCPD’s 70 employees had left the organization since he took office in 2015.