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Nolan M. Goldberg is a partner in the Litigation Department, co-head of the Data Privacy and Cybersecurity Litigation Group, and a member of the Patent Law Group. His practice focuses on technology-centric litigation, arbitration (including international arbitrations), investigations and counseling, covering a range of types of disputes, including cybersecurity, intellectual property, and commercial.  Nolan’s understanding of technology allows him to develop defenses and strategies that might otherwise be overlooked or less effective and enhances the “story telling” that is critical to bringing a dispute to a successful conclusion.

Nolan is a registered patent attorney before the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office; and an International Association of Privacy Professionals (IAPP) Certified Information Privacy Professional, United States (US CIPP) and Certified Information Privacy Technologist (US CIPT).

Cybersecurity

Nolan’s electrical engineering background, coupled with a litigation and risk management-centric focus, allows him to assist companies in all phases of incident response. Nolan often acts as a bridge between the technical and legal response teams (both inside and outside forensic consultants). Nolan uses this deep familiarity with the company and its systems to defend the company in litigations, arbitrations and regulatory investigations, including before the Federal Communications Commission (FCC); Federal Trade Commission (FTC) and before various State’s Attorneys General, including Multi-State investigations.

Nolan has worked on incidents that range from simple phishing attacks on e-mail accounts by cyber-criminals to intrusions by (formerly) trusted inside employees to complex technical breaches of hosted systems by state-sponsored advanced persistent threats (APTs). These incidents have involved both client systems, and systems of a vendor of a client that hosted its data.

It is often the case (both in response to an incident and for other reasons) that a company will want to undertake an assessment of its security posture, but has concerns about the discoverability of any such analysis.  Accordingly, Nolan also frequently assists companies’ scope and conduct privileged security assessments, including “dual purpose” assessments where privileged analysis are also used for ordinary-course purposes.

Commercial Disputes

Nolan also assists companies with commercial disputes, particularly in cases where there is a technology component, including disputes arising from hosted software agreements; outsourcing and managed services agreements; software and technology development agreements and the dissolution of joint ventures.  When these disputes cannot be amicably resolved, Nolan has litigated them in State and Federal Court and in arbitrations, including international arbitrations.

Intellectual Property

Nolan's work has included numerous patent and trade secret litigations and negotiations, primarily in cases involving computer and network-related technologies. In particular, the litigations have involved at least the following technologies: hosted software; telecommunications, computer networking; network and computer-related security hardware and software; microprocessors, voice-over Internet protocol ("VoIP"); bar code scanners  financial business methods and software, including securities settlement, fail management and trade execution and reporting software; data compression; handheld computers; pharmaceuticals; cardiac electro-stimulatory devices and prosthetics.

Nolan also has experience prosecuting patent applications before the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office in encryption, CMOS, HDTV, virtual private networks ("VPN"), e-commerce, XML/XSL, financial instruments, semiconductor electronics, medical device technology, inventory control and analysis, cellular communications, Check 21 and business methods. Nolan also has conducted numerous freedom-to-operate searches, written opinions, and counseled clients in the areas of bar code scanners, imaging, book publishing, computer networking, business methods, Power Over Ethernet ("PoE"), and digital content distribution.

He has assisted in evaluating patents for inclusion in patent pools involving large consumer electronics and entertainment companies concerning CD and DVD technology.

Computer Forensics and Electronic Discovery

Nolan is often called upon to develop e-discovery strategies to be used in all types of litigations, with a particular focus on selecting appropriate tools, developing proportionate discovery plans, cross border electronic discovery, managing the overall burden and cost of the electronic discovery process, and obtaining often overlooked electronic evidence, including computer forensics. He also assists clients to develop and implement information management programs to reduce expense and risk, meet compliance obligations, and tame e-discovery burdens.

Thought Leadership

Nolan has authored numerous articles and given numerous presentations on emerging issues and trends in both technology and law, and has often been called upon to comment on various media outlets including Business Week, IPlaw360, IT Business Edge, CIO.com, Forbes, and The National Law Journal.

Prior to practicing law, Nolan was a computer specialist at Underwriters Laboratories (UL).

As reported last week, it appears that a state-sponsored security hack has resulted in a major security compromise in widely-used software offered by a company called SolarWinds. The compromised software, known as Orion, is enterprise network management software that helps organizations manage their networks, servers and networked devices. The software is widely-used by both public and private sector companies.

The exposure, in the form of “spyware” inserted into one or more updates to Orion, is significant. According to an alert issued by the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (“CISA”), it is common for network administrators to configure Orion with pervasive privileges, which would allow it to bypass firewalls and other security measures, thus making it an enviable target for hackers. CISA categorized the SolarWinds attack as presenting a “grave risk” to government agencies and private entities.

The attack had been ongoing and undetected since perhaps March 2020 (or earlier, and certainly planned out for years). SolarWinds’s SEC filings last week estimated that about 18,000 of its customers may have downloaded the malware-laden software update for Orion.  However, the number of organizations impacted may be even higher.  Orion may be part of a larger infrastructure implementation or managed service provided by third party service providers.  And as a result, even entities that do not have a direct relationship with SolarWinds may need to investigate potential impacts.

It is important to note, however, that even though a business may have the malicious code integrated into their network, they may not yet have suffered an actual breach or intrusion.  “Luckily,” this actor seems to have taken great pains to remain concealed, and as a result, it appears that the perpetrators had not yet had an opportunity to invoke their ability to invade every impacted network in all potentially impacted cases.

While we are far from learning all of the various ways in which this backdoor was exploited, early anecdotal evidence suggests that these attackers were very interested in pivoting into other systems, including cloud-based systems, such as Office 365, that may not have any direct connection to a SolarWinds installation.  While the disabling of the so-called Orion “Sunburst backdoor” and the confiscation of the original domain name that was receiving communications from the attacker should stop further data loss from the initial entry point, it will not stop further incidents if the attacker has already established persistent access within the network. Thus, it is important to note merely because an affected organization may have closed the initial vulnerability, it should not declare itself as contained too quickly as the hackers may have surreptitiously achieved persistent access beyond the Orion entry point.

There are two sobering consequences from this recognition.  First, if an organization determines that it installed the corrupted version of Orion, an organization’s investigation may need to be very broad in nature.  Second, organizations may need to consider whether previous breaches that were resolved this year might, in fact, have had something to do with this issue that was undiscovered at the time of detection.  Accordingly, it may be necessary to revisit prior incidents thought long resolved.