Corporate Governance and Accountability in British Airways Data Breach Incident

CORPORATE GOVERNANCE and AccountabilIty
Student’s Name
10/29/2018

Corporate governance and accountability 1
Contents
Introduction......................................................................................................................................2
Background/Description of the company........................................................................................2
The Breach.......................................................................................................................................3
Risk and consequences....................................................................................................................5
Conclusion.......................................................................................................................................8
References........................................................................................................................................8

Corporate governance and accountability 2
Introduction
For every organization, ethics is a basic conduct to do. Corporate governance and accountability
is just another concept that is closely connected with ethics, The subject of corporate governance
demands an organization to act in a responsible manner towards all of it is stakeholders. The
current corporate world is much depended on technology and hence in such a scenario, it
becomes the social responsibility of every corporation to keep the data of their customers secure
in every way possible. Every nation has different laws and legislation to deal with the issue of
data breaches. For instance, the European government has introduced the General Data
Protection Regulation (GDPR), 2016/679 in the area of security data breach and protection. This
assignment is mainly focused on the issue of a serious data breach. The study of the topic is very
significant to understand the consequences of such events for the corporation as well as affected
stakeholders. The same is also important for the reason that events of data breach lead a failure to
corporate governance of a company. In the given assignment, a company will be selected an
reviewed in respect to data breach issue and at last the possible consequences on the company of
such breach will be discussed.
Background/Description of the company
The company chosen for this research assignment is British Airways that recently has been
reported a failure in the protection of personal data of it is customers. As the name of the
company implies itself, the same is engaged in the business of flag carrier. This company is the
largest airline company in the UK on the basis of fleet size and second largest airline of UK
when it comes to passengers carried (Plunkett, 2008). The company has established in the year

Corporate governance and accountability 3
1974 after the establishment of British airway Board by British Government. A company named
BA CityFlyer is the wholly owned subsidiary company of British Airways (Lashley and
Morrison, 2007). The company remains engaged in the performance of loyalty programs. British
Airways provides many of the facilities to its customers such as short haul, Mid haul, and long
haul. In addition to this, different kinds of cabins are also available for the customers from the
side of British Airways (hereinafter referred to as BA).
It is no wonder in stating that many of the incidents and accidents have happened with BA. For
example, in the year 2008, one of its flights suffered from a crash land issue (Simpson, 2014).
Further, recently in the year 2018, an attack on the website of the company has been reported. In
the discussion below, the detailed information regarding this cyber-attack is mentioned.
The Breach
A statement has come out from the side of British Airways that people who made a booking of
flight tickets with BA between a specific period i.e.21 August 2018 to 5th September 2018 can
suffer from an issue of data Breach (Whittaker, 2018). The company has not informed much
about the issue. It is not a general data breach but the same affected around 380000 customers.
Their personal data has been stolen. After a detailed study of this data breach case, experts have
stated that data of such customers probably would be available on the internet for the sale soon.
It was a clear breach of corporate governance. Although BA has not done anything with a wrong
intention, yet the company failed to protect the data of customers. The cybersecurity officer
assumed that personal data of the customers of BA such as details of credit cards, CVV written
on the same and contact number might already exist there on the dark web. Dark web is a term
that commonly refers to a corner of the internet that can only be accessed with the help of some