With Covid-19 Spread, Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Risks Also Rise: A Risk Readiness Webinar EXTRA

Speakers: April Falcon Doss, Chair, Cybersecurity and Privacy, Saul Ewing Arnstein & Lehr

The COVID-19 crisis is expanding cybersecurity and data privacy risks for financial services organizations in important ways: First, cyber criminals are taking advantage of this crisis to launch phishing campaigns specifically intended to lure email users into clicking on malicious links or attachments that appear to be legitimate information from public health officials and other news sources about the growing coronavirus risk. 

Second, as more organizations are moving towards remote transactions, cyber criminals will be taking advantage of the COVID-19 crisis to increase business email compromise attacks intended to trick unsuspecting companies and individuals into wiring funds to fraudulent accounts.

Third, as organizations of all kinds have more staff working remotely as part of their overall coronavirus response, there is a heightened risk that staff may handle privacy-protected information outside of secure channels – forwarding sensitive information to personal email accounts, uploading it into non-secure or personal cloud storage platforms, downloading it onto removable media, and the like. All of these workarounds, and other common work-from-home scenarios, increase the risk that there could be unauthorized disclosures of data that’s subject to various privacy laws or contractual data protection obligations, and that cyber actors may gain access to the organization’s data or systems.

Finally, the coronavirus outbreak is confronting organizations with complex questions under U.S. and international data privacy laws as they consider how to balance rapid and effective containment, mitigation, and response to COVID-19 threats while complying with the complex requirements of multiple privacy laws. From biometrics to data mining, organizations are looking at novel technologies as well as traditional measures to identify and forecast potential impacts of COVID-19. 
 
This session will provide an overview of the ways in which the current incident is increasing the complexity of privacy and cybersecurity legal risks, and discuss steps that organizations can take to mitigate those risks.