WindTalker Blog

Sue Reisinger reported in Corporate Counsel that, “As Cyberattacks on Business Grow, General Counsel Are 'Thirsty' for More Details.” This is great news! When a profession is thirsty for details – for knowledge - solutions follow, and in the typhoon of cybercrime happening today, thirst for solutions is exactly what is needed.

In his 3/8/17 article, “Rising cost of data breaches to $2.1 trillion by 2019…” Luke Irwin of IT Governance ominously wrote: “[We] found an astounding figure of 3.1 billion records leaked in 2016, conservatively. We also discovered an infiltration of law firms’ email worth $4 million stolen [and] data breaches anticipated to be at 2.1 trillion by 2019, in less than 2 years from now.”

The noted authority, Sharon D. Nelson, Esq., recently reported in her Ride the Lightning Blog: “Bank Sued Over Court Filing Containing Lawyers’ Personal Information,”  a thorny bank litigation case that serves to highlight the critical importance of courts and litigators coming together to jointly adopt state-of-the-art infosecurity software and protocols.

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 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.

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.