In late March 2025, the Florida Bar Board of Governors unanimously endorsed the recommendation of its Special Committee on Cybersecurity and Privacy Law that law firms should adopt written incident response plans (IRPs) to...more
In February, a coalition of healthcare organizations sent a letter to President Donald J. Trump and the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) (the Letter), urging the immediate rescission of a proposed update to...more
Insider threats continue to present a significant challenge for organizations of all sizes. One particularly concerning scenario involves employees who leave an organization and impermissibly take or download sensitive...more
1/21/2025
/ Confidential Information ,
Confidentiality Agreements ,
Cybersecurity ,
Data Breach ,
Data Privacy ,
Data Protection ,
Data Security ,
Former Employee ,
Intellectual Property Protection ,
Personal Data ,
Personal Information ,
Restrictive Covenants ,
Risk Management ,
Sensitive Business Information ,
Trade Secrets ,
UTSA
A massive data breach hit one of the country’s largest education software providers. According to EducationWeek, PowerSchool provides school software products to more than 16,000 customers, largely K-12 schools, that serve 50...more
1/13/2025
/ Compliance ,
Credit Monitoring ,
Cybersecurity ,
Data Breach ,
Data Privacy ,
Data Protection ,
Data Security ,
Educational Institutions ,
Identity Theft ,
Incident Response Plans ,
Information Technology ,
Personal Information ,
Personally Identifiable Information ,
Privacy Laws ,
Ransomware ,
Regulatory Requirements ,
Risk Management ,
School Districts ,
State Privacy Laws ,
Vendors
Ask any chief information security officer (CISO), cyber underwriter or risk manager, or cybersecurity attorney about what controls are critical for protecting an organization’s information systems, you’ll likely find...more
1/9/2025
/ Artificial Intelligence ,
Biometric Information ,
Chief Information Security Officer (CISO) ,
Cryptocurrency ,
Cyber Threats ,
Cybersecurity ,
Data Breach ,
Data Privacy ,
Data Security ,
Deep Fake ,
FBI ,
Fraud ,
Identity Theft ,
Know Your Customers ,
Multi-Factor Authentication ,
Phishing Scams ,
Risk Management ,
Secret Service ,
Social Engineering
As the healthcare sector continues to be a top target for cyber criminals, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) issued proposed updates to the HIPAA Security Rule (scheduled to be published in the Federal Register January 6). It...more
1/2/2025
/ Cyber Attacks ,
Cybersecurity ,
Data Breach ,
Data Security ,
Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) ,
Electronic Protected Health Information (ePHI) ,
Health Care Providers ,
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ,
Health Plan Sponsors ,
HITECH Act ,
Incident Response Plans ,
Malware ,
OCR ,
PHI ,
Policies and Procedures ,
Risk Assessment ,
Risk Management
Announcing its fourth ransomware cybersecurity investigation and settlement, the Office for Civil Rights (OCR) also observed there has been a 264% increase in large ransomware breaches since 2018....more
9/30/2024
/ Cyber Crimes ,
Cybersecurity ,
Data Breach ,
Data Security ,
Electronic Medical Records ,
Health Care Providers ,
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ,
Multi-Factor Authentication ,
OCR ,
PHI ,
Policies and Procedures ,
Ransomware ,
Risk Assessment ,
Risk Management
“Cybersecurity” has emerged as one of top risks facing organizations. Considering the steady stream of massive data breaches affecting millions (sometimes billions), the debilitating effects of ransomware on an organization’s...more
4/11/2024
/ Biometric Information ,
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) ,
Cybersecurity ,
Data Breach ,
Data Privacy ,
Data Protection ,
Data Security ,
FERPA ,
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ,
Genetic Testing ,
GINA ,
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ,
Personally Identifiable Information ,
Ransomware ,
Tracking Systems
To celebrate Data Privacy Day (January 28), we present our top ten data privacy and cybersecurity predictions for 2024.
1. AI regulations to protect data privacy.
Automated decision-making tools, smart cameras, wearables,...more
1/29/2024
/ Artificial Intelligence ,
Audits ,
Automated Decision Systems (ADS) ,
Biometric Information Privacy Act ,
Class Action ,
COPPA ,
Cybersecurity ,
Data Privacy ,
Data Protection ,
Data Security ,
Enforcement ,
Federal Trade Commission (FTC) ,
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ,
Online Safety for Children ,
Popular ,
Risk Assessment ,
Risk Management ,
State Privacy Laws ,
Web Tracking
The Association of Corporate Counsel and Major, Lindsey & Africa recently released their 2023 Law Department Management Benchmarking Report (Report) which tracks key trends in law department financial and operational data....more
On May 27, 2023, Texas’ Governor signed Senate Bill 768 amending Texas’ data breach notification law. The law in question, Section 521.053 of the Texas Business and Commerce Code, sets out the specific requirements any person...more
The Federal Trade Commission updated its “Standards for Safeguarding Customer Information” (“Safeguards Rule”) and extended the compliance deadline to June 9, 2023. Some entities still may be wondering – “Do these regulations...more
On August 11, 2022, the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) announced proposed rulemaking pertaining to “commercial surveillance and lax data security.” However, the overall focus of the potential rulemaking is consumer privacy...more
While the federal government attempts to move forward with a more uniform national law, Connecticut joined California, Colorado, Utah, and Virginia in passing a comprehensive consumer privacy law....more
Efforts to secure systems and data from a cyberattack often focus on measures such as multifactor authentication (MFA), endpoint monitoring solutions, antivirus protections, and role-based access management controls, and for...more
1/13/2022
/ Biometric Information Privacy Act ,
Breach Notification Rule ,
California Consumer Privacy Act (CCPA) ,
California Privacy Rights Act (CPRA) ,
Cyber Attacks ,
Cybersecurity ,
Data Breach ,
Data Protection ,
Data Retention ,
Data Security ,
Data Storage ,
General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) ,
Incident Response Plans ,
Multi-Factor Authentication ,
Third-Party
By now, plan fiduciaries and their service providers likely have heard about the DOL’s cybersecurity guidance. The Department of Labor’s stepping into cybersecurity in this way – a posting of best practices on the agency’s...more
The Texas Legislature, which meets every other year, pushed a change to its data breach notification law at the end of the session in late May, and yesterday Governor Greg Abbott signed the bill into law...more
6/15/2021
/ Corporate Counsel ,
Cybersecurity ,
Cybersecurity Information Sharing Act (CISA) ,
Data Breach ,
Data Privacy ,
Data Protection ,
Data Security ,
Governor Abbott ,
Notification Requirements ,
State Attorneys General ,
State Data Breach Notification Statutes
In a recent post, we highlighted the need for a privacy and cybersecurity training program, one not solely focused on spotting phishing attempts (although that is quite important as well). A primary reason, quite simply, is...more
4/28/2021
/ Coronavirus/COVID-19 ,
Cybersecurity ,
Data Security ,
Employee Training ,
GitHub ,
Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) ,
Personally Identifiable Information ,
Popular ,
Remote Working ,
Security Breach ,
State Health Departments
Increased remote work due to the COVID-19 pandemic has only exacerbated privacy and cybersecurity concerns, and likely has not changed the finding in Experian’s 2015 Second Annual Data Breach Industry Forecast:.....more
In mid-March, Utah Governor Spencer Cox signed into law the Cybersecurity Affirmative Defense Act (HB80) (“the Act”), an amendment to Utah’s data breach notification law, creating several affirmative defenses for persons...more
4/7/2021
/ Affirmative Defenses ,
Cybersecurity ,
Data Breach ,
Data Protection ,
Data Security ,
New Legislation ,
NIST ,
Personally Identifiable Information ,
Popular ,
State and Local Government ,
State Data Breach Notification Statutes
Federal contractors know all too well the list of annual requirements and obligations can seem overwhelming at times. One that may get overlooked by some is annual training requirements. A fairly new such training went into...more
On December 8th, the Association of Corporate Counsel (ACC), which represents over 45,000 in-house counsel across 85 countries, announced the launch of its Data Steward Program (DSP) to help organizations and their law firms...more
Assessing the privacy and cybersecurity practices of third-party service providers is critical not only for employee personal information, but also for confidential and personal information pertaining to an organization’s...more
In April of this year, which seems far longer than eight months ago, we posted about an alert from federal agencies warning that cyber threat actors were exploiting the coronavirus pandemic to fuel phishing and other attacks....more
Privacy and security continue to be at the forefront for legislatures across the nation, despite (or perhaps because of) the COVID-19 pandemic. In late May, with back-to-back amendments, Washington D.C. and Vermont...more