Author Archives: Shawn E. Tuma

Periscope Piracy Sets Up Grudge Match: Hollywood vs. Twitter

This is a prime example of the challenges that the law has when trying to keep up with evolving technology. The technology wins everytime and then we are left to clean up the mess later.

Will Officers & Directors Be Held Legally Responsible for Companies’ Data Breaches and Cybersecurity Incidents?

Will Officers and Directors be held legally responsible for their companies’ data breaches and cybersecurity incidents? That is the question I addressed in Cybersecurity Risk: Law and Trends – A Director’s Duties Must Evolve With The Company’s, which was recently published in the Spring 2015 issue of Ethical Boardroom (see article below). The article is short …

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Why Hackers Love Companies Who Use Social Media – The Point

I read an interesting article that discusses the intersection between social media and cybersecurity. The gist is that the bad guys use information they learn on social media (recall my lessons on business situational awareness) to engage in social engineering / spear phishing attacks based upon that intel. Read more: Why Hackers Love Companies Who Use Social …

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Business Social Media Accounts Can Be Part of Bankruptcy Estate

A Southern District of Texas bankruptcy court ruled that business social media accounts are property that has value and belongs to the subject business. Therefore, the accounts are part of the businesses’ bankruptcy estate and must be surrendered by the businesses’ former owner. The case is In re: CTLI LLC, No. 14-33564 (Bankr. S.D. Tx. Apr. 3, 2015). Here is a more extensive article …

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New York Court Permits Service of Divorce Papers via Facebook

Justice Matthew Cooper, of the Manhatten Supreme Court, made a landmark ruling that permits a woman to serve divorce papers on her estranged husband via Facebook messenger. In this case, it only makes sense to permit this: The husband has deserted the wife The husband has no fixed address or place employment The husband’s only contact …

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Useful Info on Cyber Security Definitions for Common Jargon & Acronyms

The world of cybersecurity is full of all kinds of cool and exotic sounding acronyms that, just as lawyers do, cybersecurity pros use to (1) communicate valuable information but, perhaps more importantly, (2) sound really cool! If you want to be in the club, here’s a great post where you go to get the basics: …

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A Few Thoughts on the Consumer Litigation Settlement in the Target Data Breach Case

Many thanks to CSO Online and Michael Santarcangelo (@catalyst) for his excellent synopsis of our conversation regarding the recent settlement of the Consumer Litigation in the Target data breach lawsuit (note, the more substantive Financial Institutions Litigation has not settled). Please give the full article a read and also give a shout-out to Michael on his Twitter …

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Cyber Law is (the new) Practical Business Law

I have had a thing for simplicity lately. A couple of months ago I was on stage speaking and something really hit me. I was watching the audience and the looks on their faces made me realize that, while what I was saying was technically accurate, to most of the people in the crowd, it …

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Is China responsible for all the hacking it has been blamed for? Not according to Norse.

An interesting article about Norse’s upgrades to its ipviking system indicate that China may not be quite as bad as we previously thought: 3C: So what have you discovered? Stiansen: We’re learning that traffic and attacks coming out of China isn’t really China. It’s actually other nations using China’s infrastructure to do the attacks. It’s …

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Private Investigators, You Are Not Immune From the Computer Hacking Laws

I have seen far too many cases where private investigators do things like install keyloggers on estranged-spouses computers, install sniffer programs to find their login credentials, and do other nefarious activities to hack their way into computers. Why should it come as a surprise to anyone that a PI has now been busted for hiring a …

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