18 August 2015 – Pick up any magazine or blog site that deals with the myriad issues facing corporate counsel and you’ll find a survey or article or conference at which/in which data privacy/security is the “top concern of GCs”. But dig deeper and the majority of GCs say “we still lack the proper preparation for a cyberbreach”. It is never lack of awareness. It always seems to be GC’s lack the resources to deal with the complexity of the problem.
And worse: many GCs simply lack the understanding of the fundamentals of cybersecurity.
So to this last point comes … to the rescue … Guidance Software with a White Paper entitled Cybersecurity Lexicon for General Counsel (link below), a nice, compact reference guide for law departments. Chad McManamy, vice president of e-discovery and assistant general counsel at Guidance, was quoted in Corporate Counsel magazine as saying the idea for the lexicon came from meetings his team would have with company leaders about cybersecurity and Guidance’s software options. Quoting Chad:
“The look in the eyes of the in-house counsel when we started talking about any of the acronyms, the advanced persistent threat stuff, would be like we were speaking a foreign language”
And given most in-house e-discovery counsel do not have much of a data security background it provides a nifty “where-to-start” guide to cyber security. Modes of attack – malware, spear phishing and zero-day attack – plus the language used by cybercrime fighters – automated incident response, attack signature and mitigation … it’s all in there. And more.
