Sizing Up the Cyber Attack and Potential Ransom Demand in the Allen & Overy Hack

How Bad is the Cyber Attack on Allen & Overy?

If LockBit has asked for a figure, there are a range of perspectives on what that could look like. One partner at a top U.K. firm commented that, typically, with a firm of A&O’s size, hackers would identify between 2% and 3% of global turnover as a “starting point”.

In A&O’s case, that could mean a figure of between £42 million and £62 million.

However, others are less sure that a ransomware group like LockBit would necessarily demand such a large sum of money.

Joanne Vengadesan, a partner at Penningtons Manches Cooper who specialises in technology transactions and data protection, said that hackers can operate like businesses, in that “they are looking for the quick win”.

“Sometimes it can boil down to calculating ‘what will someone reasonably pay without too much hassle’,” she said. “Often that means a figure which is somewhere in the middle of what is significant to a ransom group and what is manageable from a law firm IT budget perspective.”

Law firms have, in recent years, been high-profile targets for cyber attacks—understandably, given their financial strength and collection of sensitive data.

Regulating crypto might end it. And that’s just fine

Crypto is a near-useless commodity that not only enables people to gamble their savings but also helps criminals launder money and evade detection. Even in its best-case scenarios, crypto serves no glaring need. Bitcoin has become a store of value to the point that many refer to it as digital gold; that means it might help people living in countries whose sovereign currency is so devalued or so volatile as to be irrelevant. But its stability depends on belief in its intrinsic value among those holding it. Meanwhile, stablecoins — crypto tokens tied to more traditional currencies — aren’t actually stable. For those that are, a digital dollar would serve the same purpose, with more protections.

Advocates treat crypto’s lack of a trusted intermediary as a virtue. The answer to the lack of oversight that allowed SBF to defraud so many people of so much money, unnoticed, would appear to be to put cops on the beat and laws on the books — finding an analogue in the traditional financial system for every crypto entity, and imposing matching oversight. But subject these entities to the same requirements as their fuddy-duddy off-blockchain counterparts, and you’ve also gutted much of their raison d’être. That’s all the more reason to do it.

Fake Goldman Insider Gets 16 Years for Alibaba IPO Share Scam

An “expert conman” who told investors a Goldman Sachs Group Inc. connection could get them in on Alibaba Group Holding’s 2014 initial public offering was ordered to spend nearly 16 years in prison.

Frank Harold Rosenthal was sentenced Thursday to 188 months in prison by US District Judge Fernando L. Aenlle-Rocha in Los Angeles. That was substantially more than the roughly 10 years sought by prosecutors and several times the 21-month sentence suggested by Rosenthal himself. Rosenthal was also ordered to pay more than $1.1 million in restitution.

Rosenthal, 48, pleaded guilty in June to collecting some $4 million from investors based on false claims that he had a source at Goldman who could get them pre-IPO shares in Alibaba….

Sam Bankman-Fried’s Parents Are Still His Most Ardent Supporters

Their unwavering support isn’t all that unusual. But Bankman, 68 years old, and Fried, 72, aren’t like most parents. The luster of their careers as beloved Stanford Law professors helped pave the way for the stunning rise of their son’s crypto exchange, FTX. And their direct dealings with that company, and the perks they received from their son before FTX filed for bankruptcy, have opened them up to legal headaches of their own.

Bankman worked for a time as a paid employee at FTX. Fried had no formal position there, but FTX alleges that she helped direct her son’s millions of dollars of political donations. The company, now under new management, has sued them both, arguing they pocketed millions that should be returned.

The couple’s lawyers have said the allegations are “completely false” and “a dangerous attempt to intimidate Joe and Barbara.”

FTX Adds a Complex Chapter to the Financial-Fraud History Books

He added that the speed at which Bankman-Fried’s rags-to-riches-to-rags tale unfolded makes the case difficult to compare with fraudsters like Madoff, the financier who was sentenced to 150 years in prison in 2009 for stealing $65 billion from thousands of investors. Madoff executed his Ponzi scheme over the course of more than 20 years. Holmes, who was sentenced to prison for more than 11 years for defrauding investors of nearly $145 million, saw the rise and fall of Theranos play out for over a decade.

“FTX rose and fell in the span of a year,” Atwater said. “It was one of the last partygoers to the event, and they arrived on the scene when confidence was at its highest and scrutiny was non-existent.”

SPAC-Related Suit Shows How Geopolitical Risk Can Translate into Securities Litigation

One factor that contributed significantly to the total number of securities class action lawsuits filed in 2021 and 2022 was the proliferation of SPAC-related securities suit filings. Although diminished in number this year relative to the two prior years, and while the filing pace has declined as the year has progressed, SPAC-related securities suits continue to be filed in 2023. In the latest example of this continuing trend, last week a plaintiff shareholder filed a securities suit against the executives and sponsor of a SPAC that merged with a health monitoring technology company that later went bankrupt. The named defendants include officers of the bankrupt company. While the suit is interesting as an example of the continuing threat of SPAC-related litigation, it may be even more important as an illustration of the way that geopolitical risk increasingly can translate into securities litigation.

Cryptocurrencies were always just a solution in search of a problem

During jury selection in the ongoing federal fraud trial of the dethroned crypto kingpin Sam Bankman-Fried, one prospective juror worried out loud about his lack of knowledge of cryptocurrencies, despite his son’s efforts to explain them to him. “I still don’t understand how it works,” the would-be juror said. Lewis A. Kaplan, the sharp-tongued U.S. District Court judge overseeing the trial, responded: “You probably have a lot of company in this court.”

The confusion is understandable. More than a decade after cryptocurrencies were launched, the promise of these alternative currencies has amounted to little more than broken dreams. Nascent technologies can only remain the next big thing for so long. At some point, regular people need to start using them, which most certainly isn’t happening with crypto. So, while a jury in New York won’t return a verdict on the fate of Bankman-Fried for weeks, the judgment on crypto already is clear: It is a solution in search of a problem.