BIT publishes Transparency Report 2014: phishing alerts increase

28-07-2015 14:28:32

Report provides insight into number of queries of client’s personal data and notice-and-takedown requests.

BIT, specialised in collocation, internet connections, managed hosting and outsourcing, published its Transparency Report 2014. The goal of this report is to provide insights in the number of queries for personal data of BIT’s clients and the notice-and-takedown requests the datacenter received and processed. The most striking conclusion of the report is the increase in the number of phishing alerts: from 9 in 2012 to 53 in 2014. Financial institutions are more actively looking for unauthorised copies of websites and so they find them faster. That is usually followed by a notice-and-takedown request: taking the copied website offline. In 2014 this request has been granted 50 times.

Malware and Name and Address Details
Furthermore, the report shows that BIT has only received one request per year for providing personal data in 2012 and 2013. In 2014 no requests were received. Additionally, the number of complaints concerning the (alleged) hosting of malware has gone down compared to last year. In 2013, 29 complaints were submitted, where all takedown requests were honoured; in 2014 there were 20.

Wido Potters, Manager Support & Sales at BIT: “In 2012, BIT started publishing a Transparency Report and we are still one of few in the Netherlands that do so. We do this because we think it important to be open towards our relations and other interest parties, especially considering the ongoing developments in the field of privacy. If you ask us, more datacenters and providers should be doing this, in the end it concerns us all. There are many beliefs and ‘truths’ about the internet. When one thinks nothing online can be trusted and another never sees any issues, the truth is usually somewhere in the middle. By publishing numbers, you provide clarity.”

The BIT Transparency Report 2014 is free to download in Dutch and English on https://www.bit.nl/uploads/policies/Transparency-Report-2014-NL.pdf and https://www.bit.nl/uploads/policies/Transparency-Report-2014-EN.pdf