Divorce lawyers expect surge in clients after hackers dump data from Ashley Madison dating site

A hack attack on an Internet dating site that bills itself as “the most famous name in infidelity and married dating” has been followed by an apparent data dump of some 9.7 gigabytes of confidential information stolen from the “discreet” Ashley Madison site. Made available Tuesday to those willing to…

Aug 19, 2015 12:40 PM CDT

Thieves stole 220,000 more individual tax records from IRS computer system than feds first thought

Add another 220,000 individuals to the list of those who face potential identity-theft issues due to a breach of online tax return records maintained by the Internal Revenue Service. Now shut down, the IRS Get Transcript page was intended to make it easy for people to access their own tax…

Aug 18, 2015 11:05 AM CDT

Citing twin law firm websites (1 real, 1 fake), bar group urges public to beware

Add another law firm to the growing list of those whose partners have been horrified to discover that they have an Internet twin. For anyone who might happen to see both the Hughes Dowdall website for an actual Scottish law firm and the purported London-based Damian Alden Law Chambers site,…

Aug 7, 2015 11:45 AM CDT

Nearly 4 million affected by hack on medical records systems software company, feds say

Nearly 4 million patients of 11 health care providers in multiple states were affected by a hack attack earlier this year on Medical Informatics Engineering. The Indiana-based company creates software for Internet-based medical records systems used by health care providers, the Associated Press explained when the intrusion was announced in…

Aug 4, 2015 2:50 PM CDT

Gay ‘conversion therapy’ for minors opposed by ABA House leaders

“Conversion therapy,” which seeks to change an individual’s sexual orientation or gender identity, has been rejected by a long list of medical organizations, James J.S. Holmes told the ABA’s House of Delegates on Tuesday. Holmes, the outgoing chair of the ABA’s Commission on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, spoke in…

Aug 4, 2015 12:53 PM CDT

2 groups seek to solve law firms’ security issues

Aug 1, 2015 1:50 AM CDT

Ex-Wilson Sonsini worker who ignored ‘wake-up call’ insider-trade case gets 2 years

A former computer system engineer at a powerhouse Silicon Valley law firm was sentenced Wednesday to two years in federal prison for insider trading. Dimitry Braverman, 42, used his position at Wilson Sonsini Goodrich & Rosati to access confidential information about potential mergers and acquisitions from the firm’s computer system,…

Jul 30, 2015 5:00 PM CDT

US increasingly uses malware in law enforcement, expert says; should a warrant be required?

The Fourth Amendment should be interpreted to impose a warrant requirement when the U.S. government uses malware to hack computer systems for law enforcement purposes, according to a cybersecurity fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation. The author of the article, posted at SSRN, is Jonathan Mayer,…

Jul 30, 2015 11:38 AM CDT

Law firms can block hackers with ‘known good’ use of digital documents, expert says

With hack attacks, including infiltration of law firm email, on the upswing, those in charge of safeguarding computer networks may need to change their tactics, international security experts suggest. Responding to a report by a British legal regulator that says it issued nearly twice as many scam alerts in 2014…

Jul 27, 2015 4:25 PM CDT

Potential hack of federal judiciary’s information is treated as a disaster

Federal judges and judiciary employees have been alerted that they may have been among the victims of a data breach, initially revealed last month, that affected millions of federal employees. Did the breach reach justices on the U.S. Supreme Court? A spokesperson for the U.S. Supreme Court declined to answer…

Jul 13, 2015 9:28 AM CDT

Massive hack attack on feds compromised background-check info for 21.5M people

In a cyber intrusion described by the head of the FBI as “enormous,” hackers penetrated federal background-check databases to obtain access to confidential material, including social security numbers, for 21.5 million individuals, the Office of Personnel Management announced Thursday. Most of those affected, some 19.7 million people, had sought security…

Jul 9, 2015 4:05 PM CDT

Eric Holder returns to ‘last stop’ job at Covington, offers thoughts on Snowden and US Supreme Court

After six years as the nation’s top law enforcement officer, former Attorney General Eric Holder Jr. is returning to private practice at Covington & Burling and giving his thoughts on a number of issues. A partner at Covington from 2001 to 2009, before he joined the Obama administration, the 64-year-old…

Jul 6, 2015 4:55 PM CDT

Judge nixes jury conviction of ex-Goldman Sachs programmer, calls law a bad fit in source-code case

A former Goldman Sachs Group Inc. programmer committed a crime by taking computer code for a high-speed trading program with him when he left the investment bank for a new job, prosecutors insist. But they didn’t prove their case against Sergey Aleynikov, 45, because the facts of the case don’t…

Jul 6, 2015 1:45 PM CDT

Insurers hacked tens of thousands of legal files to get an edge in worker’s comp cases, lawsuit says

A client of a California law firm says insurers hacked into tens of thousands of confidential client files as part of a nationwide scheme to get an advantage in worker’s compensation cases. The federal class action filed last week by Hector Casillas names as defendants not only the insurers allegedly…

Jul 2, 2015 12:50 PM CDT

1 in 10 will click on attachments in phishing emails, study finds

Jul 1, 2015 2:20 AM CDT