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Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea Breach
A cyber incident affecting shared local authority IT systems for a number of London County Councils led to the potential compromise of sensitive personal data relating to more than 100,000 households.
The affected systems are jointly used by the Royal Borough of Kensington and Chelsea (RBKC), Westminster City Council, and Hammersmith & Fulham Council. After identifying unusual activity, RBKC acted swiftly to contain the incident, isolating impacted systems and notifying the National Cyber Security Centre (NCSC).
Subsequent investigations confirmed that data had been copied and transferred to external servers, raising concerns about possible exposure of personal information. Although the full scope and nature of the data involved is still being assessed, RBKC began notifying affected residents in early January 2026, advising them that their information may have been accessed as part of the incident.
Data Security and Governance
The internet is, by its nature, a highly interconnected and exposed environment. Data is collected, shared, and stored at a scale that people rarely realise.
High-profile data breaches attract significant public attention, but they also expose the obligations organisations have to protect the personal data of customers, clients, and employees. What was once treated as a secondary IT concern has become a material business risk, as regulators increasingly impose substantial fines on organisations with inadequate data security.
Today’s regulatory frameworks place clear legal duties on organisations regarding personal data, with increasing accountability and personal liability for C-level executives.
What Can Individuals Do?
While organisations have a clear responsibility to protect personal data, individuals can still take steps to protect themselves:
Password managers generate and store unique, complex passwords for each service, removing the risks of weak or reused passwords.
Using different emails or aliases per service limits the impact of a breach and prevents attackers from easily linking accounts.
MFA adds a critical extra layer of security beyond passwords; app-based or hardware MFA is stronger than SMS.
Regular updates and removing unused software reduce your attack surface and protect against newly exploited vulnerabilities.
Services like Have I Been Pwned alert you when your details appear in known breaches, allowing you to act quickly.
What This Tells Us About Modern Security
RBKC stated: “We spend over £12 million annually on IT and security systems. In this case, our systems did what they were supposed to do, allowing us to detect the attack and take action.”
This underlines an important reality of modern cybersecurity: even well-funded organisations with mature security controls, processes, and monitoring can still be breached. Strong defences reduce risk and improve detection, but they do not eliminate the possibility of compromise.
As a result, security thinking is increasingly shifting away from the idea of building ever-higher walls alone, and towards designing systems that assume breaches will occur and limit the damage when they do.
This principle underpins newer security models, including approaches such as those used by Binarii Labs, where complete files are not stored in any single location. The goal now is to ensure resilience even in the event of a breach.