Posts Tagged: "Cybersecurity"

The same technology that makes it easy for you to stay in touch with the office also makes it easy for nefarious individuals to hack your communications and into our devices. Because office computers are generally connected to the same network if a hacker is able to gain access to one machine that shares the network connection they can potentially, and sometimes quite easily, gain access to all of the machines and information on the network. What this means is that computers on the same Wi-Fi network can potentially have access to any unencrypted information that pass through that network.

By the end of 2015, about 40% of all credit and debit card transactions will use EMV cards. To process payments on EMV cards, businesses must upgrade to new card processing or point-of-sale technologies.

At the end of October, the FTC again made a push on Capitol Hill for stronger data privacy standards, this time dealing specifically with the idea of connected cars. In prepared testimony for the hearing, entitled Examining Ways to Improve Vehicle and Roadway Safety, the commission brought up concerns it had with certain provisions of rules currently being drafted by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA), which will require auto manufacturers to outfit their cars with vehicle-to-vehicle communications units in an effort to improve safety on America’s roads. The testimony was presented by Maneesha Mithal, an associate director of the FTC’s Division of Privacy and Identity Protection, during an October 21st hearing of the House Subcommittee on Commerce, Manufacturing and Trade.

Law firms are coming under growing scrutiny for a lack of effort in addressing hacking concerns or even coming clean with the threats which they have faced. A cybersecurity report released in February of this year by Citigroup Inc. (NYSE:C) lambasted law firms for being at high risk for cyber intrusions while the industry standard for cybersecurity remains much lower than for other industries. Law firms who deal with incredibly valuable intellectual properties should be acutely aware of the risks that they face from hackers, especially those from overseas. Patented technologies have been the target of international hackers in recent months. Just this May, the U.S. Justice Department charged six Chinese nationals with stealing IP related to wireless technologies developed by a couple of American companies.

The titans of the 19th Century made fortunes because they controlled access to the raw materials and infrastructure of commerce: steel, oil, lumber, railroads, canals, shipping. In contrast, the Third Industrial Revolution creates value not just from ideas that improve our ability to transform materials, but from information itself. This shift to intangible assets has been profound, but so swift that few have paid sufficient attention to the magnitude of the change. In the Information Age, your secrets – a new technology, a business plan, insights extracted from data analytics – define your competitive advantage. And because business is global, competition can emerge anywhere, anytime.

Technology Center 2400 covers the technologies of computer networks, multiplex communication, video distribution, and cybersecurity. In terms of average time to allowance, it is the slowest-moving technology center, with most applications waiting approximately 3.5 years before allowance. When it comes to average allowance rate, TC 2400 is lower than the USPTO at large, at 62% and 71%, respectively. As the home of art units concerning cryptography and cybersecurity, many of the patent applications in TC 2400 are on the front line of the fight against cyber crime, an increasingly large and growing problem in the United States. This is a ranking of the top 10 most successful firms at obtaining patents in TC 2400.

At a minimum, two-factor authentication rather than a single password, should be used to protect most types of confidential data. With two-factor authentication, the user is required to use two of the following three forms of identification – something they know (password or PIN), something they possess (a token or USB stick) or a physical characteristic of the user (finger swipe) in order to gain access to the data. For more sensitive data, a multi-factor approach offers an even higher degree of security. In multi-factor authentication, a user must use three or more forms of identification. For example, in addition to a password and a token, users are required to answer one or more custom questions, known only to the user.

The USPTO has also created an increasingly sophisticated cyber security defense system to protect the nation’s patents and related information. In this multi-layered system, the USPTO guards against virtually every possible type of intrusion, protecting their systems against a multitude of potential denizens, from lone wolf to suspected nation-state Advanced Persistent Threat (APT) attackers. Compared to the USPTO, or even corporations, most law firms are easy targets and the client IP on their networks is low hanging fruit that is all too easily harvested. Too many law firms still view ‘reasonable’ security as signature-based (passwords) access and malware protection, like McAfee, as good enough. Today, it is not nearly enough.

Consumers are very interested in knowing that their data is protected, and not simply their financial account data. However, as wearable technologies and the closely related Internet of Things continue to become more robust, there have been questions raised over the privacy of data created and transmitted by these devices as well as the capability of others to gain unauthorized remote access through a cyber attack. Technologies designed to provide fitness tracking could have the unintended consequence of giving a party gaining unauthorized access to that data the ability to track their movement.