Key Takeaways: The Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) have jointly issued a cybersecurity advisory in response to recent activity by the threat actor group known as Scattered Spider. Scattered Spider is known to target large companies holding sensitive data – including financial services, telecommunications, business process outsourcing, hospitality, and cryptocurrency firms – for ransomware attacks. Scattered Spider largely relies upon impersonating IT support professionals and manipulating target company employees into sharing ..read more

If you need a little intellectual stimulation after hours of Thanksgiving turkey and football, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) has just the thing — the new CISA Mitigation Guide for the Healthcare and Public Health Sectors.  This somewhat technical guide is a little dry, but it offers solid recommendations and sugested best practices to combat the pervasive cyber threats affecting the Healthcare and Public Health (HPH) Sectors. CISA identified and its guide addresses common vulnerabilities and insecure configurations across the HPH Sector, such as: • Web a ..read more

NordPass (the purveyor of a password manager) has assembled a list of the top 20 passwords in healthcare, based on usage by the world’s largest companies.  According to NordPass’s analysis, the “top” 20 passwords are: 123456 password part of the company’s name* 12345 aaron431 part of the company’s name2012* Part of the company’s name* PART OF THE COMPANY’S NAME443* company name2014* linkedin pass1 company name* COMPANY NAME’S ABBREVIATION1* company name* 00000 1111 company name* 1234 Med company name* Obviously, none of these are optimal, particularly in situation where HIPAA Protected ..read more

Key Takeaways: This executive order (EO) directs federal agencies to review and develop policies to guide the use of artificial intelligence that touches every sector of the economy. The EO directs the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to establish an HHS AI Task Force to develop a strategic plan on the responsible deployment of AI and AI-enabled technologies in healthcare settings. The EO also directs HHS to develop a strategy for regulating the use of AI-enabled tools in the drug development process. The Biden administration actions to direct government agencies on the developme ..read more

In late September, the NY State Education Department issued a two-page order providing that NY public schools may not purchase or utilize facial recognition technology. The Department relied on a report issued by the NY Office of Information Technology Services in August that was critical of the privacy implications of facial recognition technology, but left open the door for the use of other types of biometric technology in schools. The Department’s actions followed on litigation that began in 2020 after an upstate school district began implementing a facial recognition system intended to ide ..read more

The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office for Civil Rights (OCR) and the Office of the National Coordinator for Health Information Technology (ONC) have released version 3.4 of their Security Risk Assessment (SRA) Tool. The SRA Tool is designed to help healthcare providers conduct a risk analysis as required by the HIPAA Security Rule. Identifying and assessing potential risks and vulnerabilities to electronic protected health information (ePHI) are foundational elements in the implementation of security measures that protect ePHI. As hacking and ransomware attacks continue to in ..read more

Ed Note:  Thank you to Summer Associate Nicole Onderdonk for her significant contributions to this post. On July 21, 2023, the White House announced that seven leading A.I. organizations (Amazon, Anthropic, Google, Inflection, Meta, Microsoft, and OpenAI) agreed on and committed to immediately implementing voluntary safeguards for the development of artificial intelligence (A.I.) technology. Although not legally binding, these “voluntary commitments” mark one of the first steps in what could develop into a U.S. regulatory regime for A.I. With this announcement, the U.S. joins other govern ..read more

On July 13, 2023, the Biden Administration released its National Cybersecurity Strategy Implementation Plan (NCSIP) with the goal of providng transparency and coordination for its existing goals. The NCSIP details more than 65 Federal initiatives (some completed, some ongoing, others planned for the future). Each NCSIP initiative is assigned to a responsible agency and has a timeline for completion. There are five major “pillars” to the NCSIP: Defending Critical Infrastructure Disrupting and Dismantling Threat Actors Shaping Market Forces and Driving Security and Resilience Investing in a Res ..read more

On Wednesday, June 21, Foley Hoag hosted a NY CLE program “Privacy, Cyber Security and Data Protection 101: A Primer that Addresses New York’s New Mandatory CLE Requirements. You can access the materials and recording using the below links. Presentation Webinar Recording The post Privacy, Cyber Security and Data Protection 101: A Primer that Addresses New York’s New Mandatory CLE Requirement first appeared on Security, Privacy and the Law ..read more

Cyberattacks on the energy sector have been rapidly growing since 2017, and we saw an all-time high of cyberattack events on the sector in 2022. The energy sector is particularly vulnerable due to these types of attacks due to the outdated and unsecured networks oftentimes used in the industry, as well as the increased use of distributed energy resources (“DER”), which creates more openings to attack and requires more resources to monitor and manage. Wind infrastructure is no exception to the vulnerabilities of the industry. In fact, in 2022, there were three high-profile cyberattacks against ..read more