LS-ISAO New York Workshop

Crowell & Moring Partner Matthew Welling, a member of the firm's Privacy & Cybersecurity Group, will be speaking at the LS-ISAO New York Workshop, taking place in New York, NY on April 4, 2024. His presentation, "Armortext: When Your Communications Betray You, Where Do You Turn?" will take place at 3:15 p.m. EDT.

In today’s volatile cyber landscape, organizations, including law firms, face a constant barrage of attacks from cybercriminals looking to gain access to IT systems to steal sensitive data or otherwise do harm. Frequently, these attackers target communications systems such as email, video conferencing and messaging platforms because of the wealth of information they contain and that they provide visibility to whether the attackers have been detected.  In the modern connected enterprise, these systems are frequently interconnected with other corporate systems, which can lead to questions of trust in the midst of an attack.

Specifically for law firms, the loss of trust in communications systems can give rise to questions including:

• Ethical duties to inform clients
• Contractual obligations to notify others
• How to continue to carry out privileged communications with clients while under attack
• Adverse inferences from use of common out-of-band options -- cell phones, SMS messages, consumer messaging apps (e.g., Signal, WhatsApp), etc.
• And more.

To ready themselves for this, firms must prepare and practice using a robust incident response plan that can be quickly and effectively deployed to address cyber threats that arise.  Importantly, responders and other key stakeholders need to plan for when they may not be able to trust their primary communications channels, while still meeting their regulatory and other compliance obligations.

In this fireside chat, industry leaders Navroop Mitter of ArmorText and Matthew Welling of Crowell & Moring will share insights from the recently published guide, Cyber Resilience: Incident Response Tabletop Exercises 2023, and their hands-on experience conducting tabletop exercises for leading organizations and, specifically, law firms. Thematically, this discussion will center around preparing for the loss of trusted communications.