For the past six years, attorney Andrew Mutter says he has been like a storm crow crying out about the potential dangers from Cyber threats to employee, customer and other data held by most businesses. The Chattanooga native spent three years focusing on insurance and cybersecurity issues for the Atlanta law firm of King & Spalding before returning to his hometown and helping to establish the Cybersecurity group at the Chambliss law firm three years ago.
Mutter and attorney Paul Weidlich, a 30-year lawyer who also chairs the Intellectual Property Section for Chambliss, co-chair the firm’s growing Cybersecurity group.
Chambliss provides three layers of assistance – reviewing procedures and practices for shortcomings, writing policies for data processing and contract liability, and representing clients in legal disputes arising from Cyber attacks.
Such attacks are growing, as evidenced by such major data breaches as the 2016 hack of 3 billion Yahoo accounts and 147.2 million customers affected by the Equifax breach in 2017. In the past six years, Target has twice been hit by Cyber attacks that forced costly settlements and shutdowns for the retail giant.
The Identity Theft Resource Center counts more than 10,000 breaches of business data since 2005 with the average cost of a malware attack on a company of $2.4 million.