Peter A Clarke

Europe is taking decisive steps to increase its data protection with proposed legislation to create an EU wide data market which will enable the sharing of industrial and government information under the European standards. This is reported in the Wall Street Journal’s article Europe Doubles Down on Data Protection to Ward Off Silicon Valley, Chinese Influence.  This will probably be critisised as data localisation, a practice that warrants scrutiny given it is much loved by authoritarian governments for less than savoury reasons.   The scheme will involve data not exclusively involving personal information.

This development highlights Read the rest of this entry »

I have long posted on law firms being in the sights of cyber criminals.  I raised this as an increasing threat in September last year and attacks on Queensland law firms in 2017 and European law firms in 2016.

The Australian Financial Review reports, in Hackers threaten to publish data from attack on legal services firm, report on a cyber attack on 22 November 2020 by hacker legal services firm Law In Order suffering a Ransomware attack with the hackers threatening to publish data unless a payment is made. The story is also covered by itwire, insurance business mag, and itnews.  That list will grow.

Law In Order issued statements of what happens.  It is far from a best practice response.  General waffle.  Full candour is not always possible because investigations take time.  But that does not mean that writing excessive meaningless verbiage is the answer. That is particularly so when the Australian Financial Review has key information about the attack, for example that it was undertaken by Netwalker and is a ransomware attack.  That makes the statement look even sillier than Read the rest of this entry »