Investing in data protection is a crucial component of business costs

IT seems that not a week goes by these days without some news of a data leak or a company being found guilty of breaching data privacy laws in Singapore. On Wednesday, it was reported that five companies were fined S$117,000 in total for failing to secure the personal details of their customers and staff.

Swedish retailer Ikea on Sunday apologised to affected customers in Singapore for inserting 410 individual e-mail addresses in a wrong message field of a promotional mailer and sending it out.

Recently, news broke that more than three million records of the customers of beauty retail giant Sephora are being peddled on the Dark Web - a part of cyber space accessible only through a certain type of software, which means that users and Web site operators are anonymous and difficult to track down.