Houston Associate Sanjana Palla was recently featured on “Namaste Houston Radio” to discuss her professional journey in becoming a lawyer, and her experience working with the Lewis Brisbois Data Privacy & Cybersecurity team, which is a two-time Advisen ‘Cyber Law Firm of the Year” winner.
Ms. Palla spoke about the capabilities of the 24/7 incident response team, which is on alert to handle ransomware and phishing attacks, and other security breaches for clients.
“We facilitate forensic investigations, and help them [clients] in terms of regulatory and consumer notification,” said Ms. Palla. “Not only are you under cyberattack, but if breached data falls under protected personal information, then the law requires you to notify customers that their data has been breached. It’s an all-hands-on-deck process.”
Ms. Palla explained the increasing prevalence of cybercrime, and how businesses can best prepare for potential attacks.
“Data privacy impacts us all. We don’t really think about it until it happens to us, and once it happens, it is so expensive,” she said. “Millions of dollars [can] go down the drain in ransomware negotiations, where you [may need] to pay the threat actor a significant amount of money. There are a lot of serious implications.”
For smaller businesses, Ms. Palla mentioned precautions such as using multiple-factor authentication, utilizing a virtual private network (VPN), looking out for misspellings in suspicious email domain names, and investing in cyber insurance.
“Threat actors are getting so sophisticated,” said Ms. Palla. “Having cyber insurance is very important because the carrier can authorize money to be given to a threat actor, [which would lead to the threat actor releasing a] decryption key to be able to get your information back and have it restored.” In ransomware attacks, there are numerous ways to handle incidents aside from just paying the ransom amount, and the Lewis Brisbois Data Privacy team is fully equipped to guide clients through anything that comes their way. The Data Privacy team can also assist clients with table top exercises, incident response planning, cyber preparedness assessments, and policy and procedure development to ensure that clients are taking proactive measures to protect themselves.
For businesses and individuals alike, Ms. Palla suggests, “it’s always better to take preventative measures, and to be very careful about what level of protection you have.” Regardless, if a client is a victim of a data breach, the Lewis Brisbois Incident Response team has them covered.
Ms. Palla is a member of the Data Privacy & Cybersecurity Team, and assists clients comply with their various data privacy and cybersecurity obligations. She graduated from the University of Miami School of Law with a concentration in Business of Innovation, Law, and Technology.
Original source can be found here.