Cybersecurity

A federal district court in the Northern District of California granted in part a motion to dismiss putative class action claims filed against Western Digital, a hard drive manufacturer whose older devices experienced a cyber-attack, where the plaintiffs alleged that their stored data was deleted but not that it was stolen.  While plaintiffs will be permitted to maintain claims related to the data loss, they lack standing to assert claims based on future data misuse.Continue Reading Federal Court Partially Dismisses Hacked Hard Drive Claims Where Plaintiffs Could Only Show Data Deletion, Not Theft

After several twist and turns, on July 7th Intel Corp. succeeded in achieving final dismissal of class claims alleging that Intel knew about purported security vulnerabilities in its microprocessors and failed to disclose or mitigate those vulnerabilities.  The case, In Re Intel Corp. CPU Marketing, Sales Practices and Products Liability Litigation, 3:18-md-02828, had a long history—a narrowed set of class claims had survived three prior rounds of motions to dismiss.  Had the claims been allowed to go forward a fourth time, businesses may have faced additional liability concerns for attempting to address cyber vulnerabilities in their products before those exploits became public and susceptible to exploitation by hackers.Continue Reading Court dismisses class claims related to cyber vulnerability embargo

This past week, co-defendants in a class action related to the theft of cryptocurrency engaged in their own lawsuit over alleged security failures.  IRA Financial Trust, a retirement account provider offering crypto-assets, sued class action co-defendant Gemini Trust Company, LLC, a crypto-asset exchange owned by the Winklevoss twins, following a breach of IRA customer accounts.  IRA claims that Gemini failed to secure a “master key” to IRA’s accounts, and that hackers were able to exploit this alleged security flaw to steal tens of millions of dollars of cryptocurrency.  This lawsuit demonstrates the growing trend of cryptocurrency thefts resulting from cyber breaches, and ensuing litigation activity.Continue Reading Litigation Between FinTech Companies Follows Class Action Over Cryptocurrency Theft