Tag Archive for: losses

Budget wins (and losses) — Vallance’s plan — Donelan’s TikTok twist – POLITICO

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— The good, the bad and the indifferent – it’s budget fallout time.

— What does the future of tech regulation look like? Sir Patrick Vallance has some answers. 

— The row over the U.K.’s position on TikTok takes an unexpected turn.

Good morning, we hope you survived budget day and are coping with the train/teachers/tube/lecturers/doctors/civil servants/BBC journalists (have we missed any?) strikes. 

Send your news, views and tips to the team: Annabelle Dickson, Mark Scott and me on email. You can also follow us on Twitter @TomSBristow @NewsAnnabelle @markscott82.

FIRST, THE NEWS: A budget that love-bombed tech was promised, and Chancellor Jeremy Hunt delivered, sort of. There was cash for computing … regulatory promises on AI and finance … and some hefty tax and investment announcements too.

Right-hand woman: Science and Technology Secretary Michelle Donelan was sitting next to Hunt looking pleased as punch on the front bench. But as the dust settles on the government’s self-styled pro-innovation budget, the all-important detail and reaction is a mixed bag. 

Exascale is coming: The most eye-catching sum of money was the £900 million announced for a so-called “exascale” computer — for the uninitiated, that is a machine several times more powerful than the U.K.’s top supercomputer. The other big headline figure was the £2.5 billion towards a 10-year quantum computing program (more on that further down the email.) 

Prized AI: Hunt also gave the go-ahead to plans to launch an artificial intelligence sandbox — a mechanism to allow companies to test for a limited time before entering the market. That would allow innovators to “trial new, faster approaches to help innovators get cutting edge products to market.” (More on that, and other recommendations made by Chief Scientific Adviser Sir Patrick Vallance further down the email.) There will also be a prize worth £1 million a year which will be awarded to “the person or team that does the most groundbreaking AI research.”

Put your foot down: There was also another £100 million for the Innovation Accelerators programme which is focusing on three clusters:…

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Ohio Supreme Court Upholds Denial of Coverage for Ransomware Attack Losses

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The Ohio Supreme Court recently reversed the decision of an appellate court and reinstated the trial court’s grant of summary judgment in favor of an insurer and against an insured company on the company’s claim for breach of contract and bad faith denial of insurance coverage relating to damages arising from a ransomware attack.

In so ruling, the Ohio Supreme Court held that because a ransomware attack caused no “direct physical loss of or damage to” the company’s software — a requirement for coverage under the policy at issue — the insurer was not responsible for covering the resulting loss.

A copy of the opinion in EMOI Servs., L.L.C. v. Owners Ins. Co. is available at: Link to Opinion.

As background, the insured company became the target of a ransomware attack when a hacker illegally gained access to the company’s computer systems and encrypted files needed for using its software and database systems. After looking into the timing and financial feasibility of recovering the files through the assistance of a third-party company, the insured company decided to pay the ransom.

At the time of the ransomware attack, the company was insured under a businessowners insurance policy issued by the defendant insurer. Thus, the insured company’s general manager contacted the insurer to file an insurance claim within a day of the attack. However, the insurer denied coverage because, among other reasons, there was no “direct physical loss of or damage to ‘media’,” as defined in the electronic-equipment endorsement in the policy.

The policy’s electronic-equipment endorsement provided:

When a limit of insurance is shown in the Declarations under ELECTRONIC EQUIPMENT, MEDIA, we will pay for direct physical loss of or damage to “media” which you own, which is leased or rented to you or which is in your care, custody or control while located at the premises described in the Declarations. We will pay for your costs to research, replace or restore information on “media” which has incurred direct physical loss or damage by a Covered Cause of Loss. Direct physical loss of or damage to Covered Property must be caused by a Covered Cause of Loss.

Furthermore, the…

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Musk’s Losses in Twitter Court Fight Presaged His Surrender

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(Bloomberg) — Elon Musk dropped his bid to walk away from a $44 billion buyout of Twitter Inc. after losing a series of pre-trial rulings that may have foreshadowed difficulties in making his case in court.

Most Read from Bloomberg

Musk, the world’s richest person, on Tuesday proposed carrying out his original plan to buy Twitter for $54.20 per share just days before he was scheduled to argue to a judge that executives of the social-media platform misled him about the number of spam and robot accounts embedded in the company’s more than 230-million user base.

That decision may have been influenced by almost a half-dozen rulings by Delaware Chancery Judge Kathaleen St. J. McCormick over the last three months that went Twitter’s way and frustrated Musk’s efforts to show he had legitimate grounds to cancel the deal.

“It was pretty clear from her rulings the judge was laser-focused on the agreement and not the stuff Musk wanted to talk about,” said Brian Quinn, a Boston College law professor who focuses on merger-and-acquisition disputes. “His grand theory involving the bots didn’t seem to be gaining any traction with her.”

To be sure, the judge ruled for Musk on some issues, including letting him try to bolster his case for abandoning the buyout with allegations by Twitter whistle-blower Peiter Zatko about lax computer security and a lack of interest by the company in the bots issue.

But McCormick also came down hard on the Musk team’s mishandling of pre-trial information exchanges common in corporate litigation. In a September ruling, she slammed the billionaire for not turning over copies of text messages for himself and top aide Jared Birchall. The judge said there were “glaring deficiencies” in how the Tesla CEO and his lawyers responded to Twitter’s demands for relevant text messages and sloppiness in adhering to deadlines.

Here are some other rulings Musk lost:

  • A week after Twitter sued Musk in July, McCormick rebuffed the billionaire’s request for a February trial and set the case to be tried before her Oct. 17. She also lined up behind Twitter’s insistence on scheduling five court days to present testimony.

  • In August, McCormick ordered…

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API Security Losses Total Billions, But It’s Complicated

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US companies face a combined $12 billion to $23 billion in losses in 2022 from compromises linked to Web application programming interfaces (APIs), which have proliferated with the increased adoption of cloud services and DevOps-style development methodologies, according to an analysis of breach data.

In the last decade, API security has grown to become a significant cybersecurity issue. Acknowledging this, the Open Web Security Application Project (OWASP) released a top-10 list of API security issues in 2019, flagging major API weaknesses — such as broken authorization for objects, weak user authentication, and excessive data exposure — as critical issues for software makers and companies that rely on cloud services.

According to the Quantifying the Cost of API Insecurity report out this week, published last week by application-security firm Imperva and risk-strategy firm Marsh McLennan, security issues will only likely grow as APIs continue to become a common pattern for cloud and mobile infrastructure.

“The growing security risks associated with APIs correlates with the proliferation of APIs,” says Lebin Cheng, vice president of API security for Imperva. “The volume of APIs used by businesses is growing rapidly — nearly half of all businesses have between 50 and 500 deployed, either internally or publicly, while some have over a thousand active APIs.”

Interestingly, the business losses have less to do with API-specific issues, the analysis found. Rather, breach recovery and interruption of operations account for the majority of the cyber-losses. Only a small subset of companies in any country suffered losses directly linked to API vulnerabilities, the report found.

API Losses Vary by Business Segment

The Marsh McLennan data comes from reported breaches, which represents a subset of all businesses. It found that when drilling down into the data, important differences between impact can be drawn out.

For instance, certain kinds of companies (larger firms in IT and professional services, for example) are much more likely to face API-related security incidents than others (smaller companies, say, in the finance sector).

“The $12 billion is not distributed over millions of…

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