US suit is filed over Ashley Madison hack as company offers $375K reward

Another would-be class action has been filed over the massive data dump of confidential client information from the Ashley Madison dating site, this time in the United States. Seeking unspecified statutory and punitive damages, the Los Angeles federal court suit alleges negligence and invasion of privacy, according to the Financial…

Aug 25, 2015 12:05 PM CDT

Police increasingly using stingray cellphone tracking technology to solve routine crimes

Law enforcement officials from coast to coast are secretly using cellphone tracking technology to solve routine crimes. Such devices, commonly known as stingrays, are owned by dozens of police departments from Baltimore to Los Angeles, USA Today reports. However, the use of such technology is often concealed from suspects and…

Aug 24, 2015 3:25 PM CDT

Canadian lawsuit seeks $578M over dump of hacked info from Ashley Madison dating site

Two Canadian law firms filed a class action lawsuit in Windsor, Ontario, on Thursday over a much-publicized data dump this week by unknown hackers of information about users of the Ashley Madison dating site. Although a disabled widower is currently the only named plaintiff, attorney Ted Charney of Charney Lawyers,…

Aug 24, 2015 5:45 AM CDT

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