Monday, May 22, 2017

Negligence by Democrat National Committee is sufficient cause for lawsuits. DNC knowingly disregarded professional computer security advice, thus providing customers and shareholders cause to sue-Bloomberg, July 2016

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Financial details about Democrat donors purported to be from DNC computers were published in June 2016 by Guccifer 2.0.. This kind of information, assuming it's authentic, could be used by injured parties as grounds to sue the DNC since it knowingly disregarded warnings about security shortcomings on its computers.

7/27/2016, "Democrats Ignored Cybersecurity Warnings Before Theft," Bloomberg, Michael Riley

"The Democratic National Committee was warned last fall (2015) that its computer network was susceptible to attacks but didn’t follow the security advice it was given, according to three people familiar with the matter....

Computer security consultants hired by the DNC made dozens of recommendations after a two-month review, the people said. Following the advice, which would typically include having specialists hunt for intruders on the network, might have alerted party officials that hackers had been lurking in their network for weeks--hackers who would stay for nearly a year. 


Instead, officials didn’t discover the breach until April (2016). The theft ultimately led to the release of almost 20,000 internal e-mails through WikiLeaks last week on the eve of the convention....
  
Cyber-security assessments can be a mixed blessing. Legal experts say some general counsels advise organizations against doing such assessments if they don’t have the ability to quickly fix any problems the auditors find, because customers and shareholders could have cause to sue if an organization knowingly disregards such warnings....


The security review commissioned by the DNC (in 2015) was perhaps the most detailed of a series of missed warnings....

The consultants briefed senior DNC leaders on the security problems they found, the people familiar with the matter said. It’s unclear whether Wasserman Schultz was present. Now, she is likely to face criticism over not only the content of the e-mails -- including one in which a party official proposes pushing stories in the news media questioning Sanders’s Jewish faith -- but also the failure to take steps to stop the theft in the first place.

Shame on them. It looks like they just did the review to check a box but didn’t do anything with it,” said Ann Barron-DiCamillo, who was director of US-Cert, the primary agency protecting U.S. government networks, until last February. If they had acted last fall, instead of those thousands of e-mails exposed it might have been much less.”...

The review found problems ranging from an out-of-date firewall to a lack of advanced malware detection technology on individual computers, according to two of the people familiar with the matter.

The firm recommended taking special precautions to protect any financial information related to donors and internal communications including e-mails, these people said.

The DNC paid $60,000 for the assessment, according to federal filings."... 







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