In John Cougar’s nostalgic anthem Cherry Bomb, he writes, longing for the good ol’ days: “That’s when a sport was a sport.”

Last week, I was longing for the good ol’ days when a data breach was a data breach…

As the world knows, on May 3rd, US Bank announced that hackers had stolen some of their employees’ W-2 information and other data from US Bank’s ADP Employee Portal.  This has been widely reported and understood as the May 3rd “ADP Breach,” a somewhat disingenuous moniker for the episode, as it turns out.

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IT Security teams scrambled yesterday to upgrade all devices running older versions of OpenSSL to 1.0.2h or 1.0.1t which will, according to the OpenSSL project team, “…fix several security defects with maximum severity ‘high.’”  It’ll be a busy few days, but because your organization has a mature security team led by an experienced CISO, you’ve prepared for the new release, put a plan in place to execute the upgrades, and in short order, will have all your Internet-facing IPs securely patched.

Mission probably accomplished by the time you’ve read this.

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I don’t know about you, but I hate the “spork”. That mutated plastic utensil that purports to serve as both a spoon and a fork?  In reality, it does neither the job of the spoon or the fork very well, and no one would choose a spork if given the option of a stand-along spoon and fork.

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One of my first manager’s favorite aphorisms was “if I had more time, I’d write you a shorter letter.” I personally experienced a variation of this theme in college, as I found there was an inverse correlation between the length of my essay exam answers and my knowledge/confidence in the answer; the more I knew about the subject, the shorter my answer, while I did my best to blind the professor with words when I had no idea what I was talking about.

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In a recent ILTA survey, over 420 law firms of all sizes were asked what their top 3 technology issues were within their firm (Source: ILTA Technology Survey, 2015).  The number one answer they gave was security/risk management.  In fact, security and risk management concerns have significantly increased over the last 4 years from 24% in 2012 to 42% in 2015.

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