EDINA, MN – September 10, 2018 – Hellmuth & Johnson partner Richard Hagstrom was recently appointed by the United States District Court for the District of Oregon to the Plaintiffs’ Steering Committee in a multidistrict litigation against Intel Corporation alleging security vulnerabilities in Intel processors. Hagstrom represents the unique claims of regulated enterprises which have duties under the law to protect private information of others from disclosure.
In January 2018, Intel confirmed that virtually every processor it manufactured and sold during the past decade or more suffers from a number of security vulnerabilities. Security researchers have publicly detailed three vulnerabilities: one called “Meltdown” and two referred to as “Spectre.” These vulnerabilities permit hackers to access secure areas of the chip, potentially putting at risk of disclosure confidential information such as patient records, health data, bank account numbers, other financial information, or account passwords.
While these security issues affect businesses and consumers alike, companies such as healthcare-related entities, financial institutions, insurance companies or others with responsibilities to protect the private information of customers or employees suffer additional costs. Hagstrom says that the impact of the security vulnerabilities on these enterprises includes an array of costs, such as increased time and personnel costs for IT staff to test and install software patches across networks of servers and computing devices, and to verify the interoperability of these patches with numerous software programs run on the network and devices. In addition, the patching can degrade the processing speed of impacted computers or servers, which could require equipment to be replaced before its typical useful life has expired once non-defective CPUs become available.
For a majority of his 40 years of practice, Hagstrom has prosecuted and defended major class and mass action matters in federal and state courts across the country.
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