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Lawyers have always had a duty to be competent in technology, but the ABA Model Rule put this duty in writing, impacting cybersecurity practices. Twenty states have followed the ABA’s lead and adopted a duty of technological competence, all but requiring encryption.

In the past, for individuals and small businesses, cyber security was important to mitigate the inconvenience of spam, viruses that required restoring back-ups of corrupt files, and letters to credit bureaus to clear up identity theft issues.

In recent briefings, we have reported on Internet criminals’ behavior with regards to researching their victims’ professional profiles and associations (using LinkedIn recruiter tools, for example) and using these social cues to lure unsuspecting victims into sending money to imposter accounts.

Imposter emails targeting businesses today are far more sophisticated than traditional phishing emails or the “Nigerian prince” emails of yesteryear. These new Business Email Compromise (BEC) attacks use imposter emails that reflect a deep understanding of people’s roles and messaging patterns within a target organization.

On Sunday, more than a hundred media outlets around the world, coordinated by the Washington, DC-based International Consortium of Investigative Journalists (“ICIJ”), released stories on the “Panama Papers”, which is an exposé of private client and internal work product emails and other files.  More than 5 million emails and files were stolen from within the […]