Legal News Archives

Legal News

Report: Home Depot Fallout Reveals History of Lax Security, Hiring

September 23, 2014 Paul Roberts

Its a truism in cyber security that behind every great hack often lies a string of bad decisions and missed opportunities. Its also true that when you dig into the details of damaging cyber incidents, the root causes are personal and psychological as often as they are technical in nature. Organizations -even sophisticated and wealthy organizations – end up making bad decisions for all the wrong reason: failing to properly assess their risk, or pursuing short term savings when long term investment is needed. Home Depot learned via law enforcement that a breach of transaction data exposed as many as 52 million credit card transactions, the largest retail credit card breach to date. But as more comes out about the breach at home improvement giant Home Depot, it starts to look a lot more like the root causes there may have started in the HR department rather than the data center. The […]

Exploding Gas Tanks: Risk, Liability and Internet of Things

September 5, 2014 Paul Roberts

We like to construct Hollywood friendly plots around a lot of the seminal moments in our collective history. For Civil Rights, we like to picture the integration of Little Rock High School, Rosa Parks’ courageous protest on a Montgomery bus or the March on Washington. For environmentalism, we talk about Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring or, maybe, the burning Cuyahoga River in Cleveland. (This vintage news footage of the 1969 fire calls it the fire that “sparked the environmental movement” without any apparent irony.) For automobile safety, we imagine Ralph Nader and the image of a 1972 crash test that shows the gas tank of the Ford Pinto exploding in a rear impact collision, engulfing both cars in flames. But those memories are often way oversimplified. Little Rock and the Montgomery bus boycott were just two battles in a fight for civil rights that went back to the end of the Civil War. Likewise, the Cuyahoga […]

Hack Tool Authors Deny Link To Celeb Photo Leaks

September 2, 2014 Paul Roberts

With some of Hollywood’s biggest stars issuing statements on Monday condemning the leak of personal photographs online, attention has turned to identifying the source of the leaks. But more than 24 hours after the photos appeared, there are more questions than answers about its source. Early attention has focused on an automated tool that exploited an apparent vulnerability in Apple’s FindMyiPhone feature. But by Monday, there were denials from the makers of that tool that it played any role in the massive privacy breach that saw photos of A-list celebrities like Jennifer Lawrence, Kate Upton and others leaked online. Within hours of the photos’ appearance on the image sharing site 4chan, attention shifted to the cause of the leak and the coincidence of the leaked photos with the publication of iBrute, a simple tool available on GitHub in recent days. According to this published report by Owen Williams over at TheNextWeb, the […]

The Internet of Things: Legal Woes for CIOs | CIO

August 22, 2014 Paul Roberts

Stephanie Overby over at CIOs has an interesting piece today on the legal pitfalls that Internet of Things adoption may hold for chief information officers (CIOs). While the prospect of more, intelligent devices holds great promise for organizations across the economy, Overby notes that there are also risks – especially when it comes to the wholesale harvesting of customer data. “Many of the legal issues are not well understood even by sophisticated privacy practitioners,” the article quotes Christopher Wolf, a partner at the law firm Hogan Lovells saying. “In the world of sensors rather than computer screens, the legal issues are challenging.” CIOs are advised to consider “self-regulating” around issues like privacy, security and consent, to stay on the right side of the evolving law. CIOs should scrutinize every decision to collect user information and ask whether the benefits to collecting the data outweigh the potential costs, especially in the event of […]

RSA: Boleto Fraud Ring in Brazil Linked To Billions in Bogus Transactions

July 2, 2014 Paul Roberts

RSA, the security division of EMC Corp. said on Wednesday that its researchers uncovered a massive online fraud ring that has infiltrated The Boleto, a popular payment method in Brazil. RSA said in a blog post on Wednesday that a coordinated investigation a “Boleto malware or ‘Bolware’ fraud ring that may have compromised 495,753 Boletos transactions over a two-year period. The value of the transactions is estimated at $3.75 billion USD, or $8.57 Brazilian Reals. The Boleto is a popular and regulated electronic payment system that is the second most popular form of payment in the country, after credit cards. According to RSA, the malware in question allows attackers to carry out man-in-the-browser attacks that modify transaction details on an infected client system so that funds are directed into mule banking accounts controlled by the fraudsters. RSA researchers discovered 8,095 fraudulent Boleto ID numbers tied to 495,753 compromised transactions. The Bolware botnet is […]