Ride the Lightning

Wall Street and Law Firms to Share Cybersecurity Info

February 25, 2015

The New York Times reported on this story, but truth be told, it has been some time in the making. For almost a year, law firms and banks have talked about setting a legal group that would be affiliated with the banking industry’s main forum for sharing information about threats from hackers, online criminals and even nation states.

The forum is known as the Financial Services Information Sharing and Analysis Center. The hope is that this new legal group could be set up by the end of the year. The information would be shared anonymously. This has come to seem more imperative as law firms begin to understand the extent to which they have become serious targets for hackers seeking to harvest data about their corporate clients.

As the article notes, attacks on law firms often go unreported because the firms are private and not subject to the same kind of data-breach reporting requirements as public companies that handle sensitive consumer information. Of course, there are ethical requirements, but those seem to me to have been honored largely in the breach.

Mandiant, a security firm that is a division of FireEye, said that many of the larger hackings of law firms were traced back to the Chinese government, reportedly seeking information on patent applications, trade secrets, military weapons systems and contract negotiations.

Good to see the heightened awareness, but discussions on this issue have moved with the speed of glaciers. I will certainly report back if and when the group becomes a reality.

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