WindTalker Blog

AJ Shankar, founder and CEO of EverLaw recently wrote in Bloomberg Law, Big Law Business, urging the legal industry to take the lead in establishing eDiscovery Security Standards.

Reuters tech/biz writer, Jonathon Stempel, recently reported in “Yahoo strikes $117.5 million data breach settlement after earlier accord rejected,” that the settlement is the largest common fund class action settlement in data breach history. The implications of this settlement (revised from an early attempted settlement in hopes of being more palatable to federal district Judge Lucy Koh) are staggering.  

In the Washington Post article, entitled “Millions of sensitive Facebook user records were left exposed on public web, security researchers say,” Post reporters Tony Romm and Elizabeth Dwoskin report that over a half billion Facebook records have been sitting exposed to any comers on an Amazon cloud-computing server. Cybersecurity implications – and lessons –keep spinning off from the social media giant’s privacy stumblings.

In the Washington Post article titled “FEMA ‘major privacy incident’ reveals data from 2.5 million disaster survivors,” reporters Joel Achenbach, William Wan, and Tony Room reveal a shocking security failure by the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA). The failure included the unnecessary and unauthorized sharing of personal information, including banking details and home addresses, of disaster victims from the 2017 California wildfires and Hurricanes Harvey, Irma and Maria.

Today’s General Counsel recently commented on tech-security writer Jason Kichen’s article published in securityboulevard.com, “Want to Weed Out Anomalies? Use an Adversary Mindset,” raising awareness for General Counsel of the cybersecurity phenomenon known as “anomaly deluge.”

In his an article earlier this year for Law Journal Newsletters, “’Dark Overlord’ Hack Shows Mounting Cyber Risks for Law Firms” law firm global strategy and economics writer Dan Packel reports on a law firm’s worst nightmare: potentially becoming the weak link in a global extortion plot related to the 9/11 World Trade Center attacks.

Jason Tashea’s 1/10/19 article in the ABA Journal online, “How to redact a PDF and protect your clients,” further affirms the dangers of legacy software, underestimating technology risk, and mindset; yet it fails to identify current Infosecurity software solutions.

Louise Matsakis’ 1/9/19 article in Wired, “Paul Manafort Is Terrible with Technology,” and L.V. Anderson’s 1/8/19 article in Digg, “Lawyers File Response to Mueller Claims, Accidentally Fail to Properly Redact The Secret Stuff,” eloquently converge to illustrate the dangers of legacy software and mindset.