Insights

On June 18, 2023, the Biden-Harris administration announced the launch of a new “U.S. Cyber Trust Mark” program (hereinafter the “Program”). First proposed by Federal Communication Commission (“FCC”) Chairwoman Jessica Rosenworcel, the Program aims to increase transparency and competition across the smart devices sector and to assist consumers in making informed decisions about the security of the devices they purchase.

A new Cybersecurity & Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) alert advises that, starting in late May, a well-known ransomware group called Clop compromised a widely used managed file transfer (MFT) platform called MOVEit Transfer, reportedly impacting hundreds of companies globally. 

On April 17, 2023, the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office for Civil Rights (“OCR”) published a Notice of Proposed Rulemaking (“NPRM”) entitled HIPAA Privacy Rule To Support Reproductive Health Care Privacy. The NPRM, which OCR released in response to the Supreme Court’s 2022 decision in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization (“Dobbs”), aims to amend regulations implementing the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (collectively, “HIPAA”) to mitigate concerns about reproductive health care privacy that have arisen as a consequence of the Dobbs ruling.  

State privacy law developments continued on a similar trajectory as previous years, marked by a legislative focus on data privacy issues. At the beginning of the 2023 legislative session, five states (California, Colorado, Virginia, Utah, and Connecticut) passed comprehensive privacy laws, all of which are now effective and enforceable.