Cybersecurity: The legal response | NJBIZ

Lindabury’s Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Practice Group Co-Chair Eric Levine spoke at the NJBIZ Cybersecurity conference on May 17th at the Raritan Valley Country Club in Bridgewater, explaining how companies can get hurt by doing the right thing when it comes to cybersecurity.

“To protect any small business, you need to have legal involved, if for no other reasons than to cloak what you are doing with privilege or confidentiality — by that, I mean communications with your attorney that nobody else can get to,” he said.

“Think about it,” he told the audience. ‘You hire (an expert) who comes in and does a vulnerability assessment and they find out you have a gaping hole in your security. That’s great. You fix it.

“What if you don’t get the fix in before there’s a breach and all of your employees’ information gets put out on the net and people have identity theft? One of your employees loses everything and they come back and say, ‘I’m suing you because you were negligent in keeping your system secure.’

“What’s the best piece of evidence that they are going to have that you were negligent? The analysis that you just did, which showed the gaping hole in your security. So, you say to yourself, ‘What did I just do? I hurt my company by doing the assessment.’”

You can read the full online text of Tom Bergeron’s recent article covering the NJBIZ event here. (may require a subscription)