The Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) has increasingly attempted to expand the reach of a decades-old accounting law to cybersecurity breaches. A federal judge recently ruled against most of the SEC’s charges against SolarWinds Corp.
In an article for Bloomberg Law, cybersecurity leader Ed McNicholas said, “Thursday’s decision will eliminate any sense in which cybersecurity writ large can be shoehorned into being an accounting issue.”
In Corporate Counsel, Ed said the ruling doesn’t mean the SEC will back down when it comes to targeting individuals.
“The concerns about personal liability for executives are still very much alive. The ruling does not suggest that it was improper or unsupported to target [SolarWinds’ CISO] Tim Brown and in fact it goes into detail about personal conduct,” Ed said. “So this should not give people much comfort that the SEC won’t look at executives and individuals in appropriate cases.”
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