Assault on the Capitol: Stolen Computers Are Not a Major Concern TechCrunch reported on January 8 that the theft of two computers in the January 6 storming of the Capitol is a not a cybersecurity nightmare, in spite of some histrionic headlines that suggested otherwise. One of the computers was a laptop taken from House Speaker Nancy Pelosi’s office. In the unlikely event that this laptop had sensitive data, no doubt it was remotely wiped…

Bloomberg reported on January 6 that the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts has said that the U.S. federal judiciary’s electronic filing and case management system suffered an “apparent compromise” during the hack of SolarWinds Orion products. The federal courts are working with the Department of Homeland Security on an audit of the system, AO director James Duff said in a memo distributed to federal courts. The federal courts “suspended all national and local use”…

On January 5, Bob Ambrogi reported in his LawSites blog the extraordinary (to me) news that longtime competitors in the legal research market, Casemaker and Fastcase, have merged. The new entity will operate under the Fastcase brand and will have an estimated subscriber base of more than three quarters of all lawyers in the United States. How things change. It was over a year ago when the two companies were battling one another in federal…

Cybersecurity firm Check Point reported in its January 5 blog post that in the two months since November 1, 2020, there has been an increase of over 45% in the number of attacks against healthcare organizations globally, compared to an average 22% increase in attacks against other industry sectors. Attacks involving ransomware, botnets, remote code execution and DDoS all increased, with ransomware attacks showing the biggest spike when compared to other industry sectors. The ransomware…

It is no surprise that Zoom itself had a blog post about the trial referenced above as well as a case study. Houston-based law firm Smyser Kaplan & Veselka (SKV) had a stroke of luck in its timing. Before the pandemic, in August 2019, they worked with AV solutions designer and Zoom partner Data Projections to install and integrate a Polycom Group Series 500 conference room system with over 160 inches of wall monitors…

Thank heavens the calendar page has turned. We have many challenges ahead but good riddance to 2020. It really was a dumpster fire – and one of our daughters gave us a 2020 dumpster fire ornament to hang on our Christmas tree. How appropriate. As 2020 was winding down, Jim Calloway and I recorded our Digital Edge podcast. We decided to forego having a guest and instead discussed the lessons learned from 2020 and…

My day began with a look at Bruce Schneier’s December 21 post about a Cellebrite post on December 10 (helpfully preserved by the Wayback Machine) titled “Cellebrite’s New Solution for Decrypting the Signal App.” Cellebrite released a heavily edited version of that post with the same date but a new title, “Helping Law Enforcement Legally Access the Signal App.” The original very long post with lots of detail was truncated into three paragraphs. Haaretz had…