What Hungary’s Data Seizure Scandal Means For Your Business
This new scandal in Hungary all started with what is now considered an “illegal” seizure of an entire office of servers which would presumably hold everything from some data on politicians, personal information, e-mails, sensitive files, databases and more. The office would likely have been completely compromised of all its data and taken offline of course since the servers were seized.
The good news is “weeks” after the fact, it looks like the “illegal” seizure has been declared illegal but now it’s too late. An entire office of servers has been compromised and infrastructure taken offline. What is most concerning is that it appears to be motivated by political issues and it didn’t matter that from the start it was clearly illegal according to EU law.
I think Hungary is a great country, and it appeared to be a standout but what I’ve never said is first hand stories of “entire racks of servers” being seized. And what’s worse in Hungary, if they want to investigate 1 IP or 1 server they don’t stop there, as I’ve mentioned it could be the entire office or datacenter. And to make it worse, usually “all data is copied” as evidence even if the owner of the server(s) did nothing wrong, they may have just been collateral damage because 1 other server in the datacenter was being investigated. And with this recent scandal, the hard questions in Hungary and in the EU, how often are servers seized for political or other frivolous reasons which are in violation of EU law?
This speaks to the theme I’ve mentioned is that the EU’s privacy laws are meaningless, they break their rules often, not as an exception. If you want your data and your company to be protected, you need to host in jurisdictions that have actual and protections and privacy. Whether it’s a place like Hong Kong or Turkey, the EU is proving itself to be a completely unsafe for your data and applications, even EU citizens are not spared from privacy violations, whether the alleged hacking by German ISPs, Swiss Crypto AG Scandal, or bans, fines and arrested for simply sharing opposing information.
