Guerrilla marketing tactics are frequently being used more and more these days to attack and discredit competitors within a particular industry. Typically, the guerilla marketer will go to a review site to post a negative comment about a competitor . However, this is not the only method employed – especially when a company has a very […]
The Wall Street Journal reported today that a group of U.S. lawmakers are pressing the Securities and Exchange Commission to make corporations, detail in their quarterly reports, any “material” cyber-attacks that they experience. The purpose of this required disclosure is to create more transparency amongst regular investors. The pressure is a result of the recent massive data […]
A recent development to the State of Washington Breach Notification Law, RCW 19.255.010, has to deal with the adoption of a “retailer liability” provision. RCW 19.255.020 allows for banks, who incur significant costs due to security breaches, to have a remedy against retailers and payment processors that fail to protect against a security breach. The State of […]
Last week I was going to blog about the collateral damage that had been done to Amazon as a result of its AWS cloud computing unit being taken down, and rendering thousands of companies unable to access their mission-critical information. However, it was disclosed that Apple and Google were able to track people who use their Smartphones, […]
“Redundancy, Redundancy, Redundancy.” Any good risk management tool is predicated around this mantra, and yet today, in a highly unusual incident, Amazon Web Services (AWS) servers’ went blank. Client sites from Foursquare to Reddit were rendered inaccessible Thursday, and there is no communication from AWS personnel as to why the system went down. I wonder how much […]
A few weeks ago I blogged about how the French government is demanding information repository companies, like Google, Yahoo, et al, allow its citizenry to be completely wiped from oblivion on the Internet. I think what is most intriguing about “le Doit al ‘Oubli” is how it highlights the distinct differences between European and American viewpoints […]
I wanted to highlight this great article on a recent joint venture between California-based Freewaters, L.L.C., and the formation of a new entity within the United Kingdom. My uncle, Mr. Gary T. Shara, was retained to help British lawyers form the correct entity for his client. Congratulations to all on this international business transaction, and […]
The increase in frequency over firings related to public comments posted on social media sites is an emerging area in employment/labor law. Recently, I followed the case of a Connecticut ambulance company who fired its employee over rants she made on Facebook about her supervisor. The National Labor Relations Board (“NLRB”) asserted that such communications […]
Due to a “massive” breach by the marketing firm Epsilon, an unknown amount of names and e-mail addresses were exposed that could potentially lead to phishing attacks by organized criminal elements. Epsilon is a service provider which handles e-mail marketing lists for hundreds of clients, including giants like JPMorgan Chase, Citibank, Target, and Walgreens. The […]
Most regulations define the term “personal identifiable information” to mean information about an individual that is recorded, which includes things like: name, address, e-mail, age, sex, marital status, social security number, health care history, religious or political beliefs, race, nationality, ethnicity, origin…you get my point. However, with the evolving landscape of technological innovations related to online behavioral […]