Cybersecurity is big business ? ????????? Ecentral ? ?? ...

Wherever law and technology collide, interesting issues like cybersecurity, intellectual property protection and digital evidence, abound. Those issues make legal consultants such as Scott Warren very much in demand.

An attorney by trade, Warren worked as a litigator in LA for 8 years before moving to Japan in 1993 to work with a business consultancy company. During that time, he wrote the ?Japan Employers Handbook.? Then he worked for 7 years for Sega Corp, handling their international commercial, litigation and anti-piracy issues, ending as General Counsel in 2001. That was followed by a stint at Microsoft legal to help get the Xbox launched in Japan and other Asian countries. He did all the licensing work for that as well as the anti-piracy work for Xbox worldwide, and led Microsoft?s anti-counterfeiting work for all of its products for north Asia.? He also headed a project called, Internet Safety, designed to help protect people from Internet-related risks.

In 2006, Warren joined Kroll as managing director of its intellectual property practice in Asia as well as working on computer forensics and eDiscovery services. He became the head of Kroll Japan?s investigative unit in 2008. In late 2009, he became regional managing director of Kroll?s legal technology group, Kroll Ontrack, charged with turning around the operations. In his tenure, he led the organization to 40% revenue growth in 2010, while reducing expenses, 400% revenue growth in FY2011, and was setting the pace for 50% additional revenue growth in the 6 months of FY2012.

In May, Warren left Kroll to setup his own company, Warren Associates International. Japan Today catches up with him to learn more.

Why did you decide to start your own company?

I thought now would be a good time for me to form a company that I could use as a platform to do all the things I have learned over the years. There is a lot of growth in my areas of expertise ? wherever law and technology collide. That is certainly true in cybersecurity and intellectual property brokering. For example, how do you get money and value out of your IP portfolio? Or when you create some new technology, how do you license, market, sell, and protect it throughout Asia?

What services do you offer?

Consulting on issues such as intellectual property licensing and protection, cross-border legal issues, cybersecurity, anti-counterfeiting investigations, internal investigations, U.S. litigation and international regulatory services. In the future, I plan to add eDiscovery and computer forensics services, after I put a team and technology together.

Since you have just started your company, how are you marketing yourself?

I have a network of people whom I?ve worked with for 20 years and I often do speaking engagements. That gets the buzz out pretty quickly. People know you and they trust you. That?s the way business is done here. I have been identifying where I have the support needed to really drive things forward. The best way to grow a business is to take the opportunity you have and knock it out of the park, getting repeat customers and positive word-of-mouth. So you better do it right.

What?s happening in the world of cybersecurity?

The biggest issues currently seem to surround social network sites, which people increasingly use to connect with others. What happens with private information? Does it get protected in a good way or is it left exposed so that user IDs, credit card numbers and other personal information get out? That?s more than just a straight technology question. It?s not just a question of how you store such data on a separate server with encryption, though that is a good start. It requires a whole, well-conceived policy. If you?re a 12-year-old girl and someone propositions you on the social network site, who do you report it to? How does that get handled by the company running the site? If someone is getting stalked or there is abusive language, how will a corporation protect the users of their network? If user data is stolen, is the company ready to investigate and stop the leak? Are they in a position to effectively work with law enforcement, perhaps worldwide, to thwart the loss and punish the hackers? It is important that the solutions are contemplated globally given that is often where users, and abusers, are.

Why do you find IP so interesting?

The fun thing about intellectual property law is that it is constantly changing and evolving as new technology turns it on its head. Other areas of the law tend to have a pretty solid structure, but IP law changed almost overnight since the computer and now the Internet. With the advent of computers, we had to start asking questions like: is it illegal to copy all or a part of someone?s program in only the memory of a computer. The Internet raises all sorts of questions about what is ?breaking and entering? someone?s property. For example, there was recently a case where a criminal claimed his house had been illegally searched because the stolen iPad he had sent out a signal locating it to its user. He lost, but just the argument itself is interesting. There are all sorts of new questions about how we should deal with digital evidence, and so forth. It?s a fascinating area of the law in which to be practicing.

What?s going on with hackers?

There are two things that have changed in the hacking community. One is that 15-20 years ago, hackers were, in general, pimple-faced kids who did it for status with their friends. You would know you got hacked and corporations would take steps to protect themselves.

Now, hackers are incredibly quiet in the way they get in. Corporations don?t know that they are in. They?ve been in for two years watching everything that?s going on. It?s what we call APTs (Advanced Persistent Threats). Google China got hit with that, for example. The people behind this are no longer doing it for fun. They are doing it for profit and that has changed the nature of cybercrime and cybersecurity.

One other twist is the use of government-sponsored hackers. One example was the complete shutdown of the country of Georgia?s network at the same time Russia invaded several years back. More recently, the Stuxnet computer worm was a very focused attack on a particular Iran uranium enrichment facility. The hack was so sophisticated that many experts believe it to be government sponsored. Those types of attacks are increasing against societal infrastructure, including water treatment plants, reservoirs, etc.

What are you doing in the field of IP brokering?

Let?s say you have a U.S. patent. If you want to enforce that patent against an infringer, you likely have to spend $5 million to take it to court in the U.S. Now, Japanese companies often have an aversion to litigation in the first place, and they come to a point where they say, ?Are we really using this technology? If not, then I don?t necessarily want to pay to continue holding it.? They let it expire when there may be companies that are willing to buy it and who will even license back the right to the company to continue using it. So IP brokering offers a method of monetizing a company?s IP to the benefit of the corporate bottom line. This is growing in popularity in the U.S. and Japanese companies, with their often large portfolio of patents, have a great opportunity participate as well.

How big is eDiscovery?

There is great growth of eDiscovery in Japan?how to use technology to help you identify relevant documents within people?s hard drivers or a corporate network when a company gets sued in the U.S. for patent infringement, for example. Something that has hit Japan quite hard in the past 18 months has been anti-trust cases against the auto parts industry. The U.S. Department of Justice and the European Commission have brought many suits against Japanese auto parts makers. Banks have been hit as well for allegedly fixing exchange rates. Because of this, lots of Japanese companies are facing eDiscovery for the first time.

In Japan, when you sue somebody, if you?ve got 5 documents going into that case, you probably end up with 5 documents coming out. In U.S. litigation, or international anti-trust investigations, the party suing you is required to produce anything that is relevant to the litigation. In the latest Apple v. Samsung IP case, court documents indicate Samsung had some 2700 employees that were potentially relevant to the case. We?re talking millions and millions of documents which if you were to print them out, would fill this office several times over. How do you actually analyze and get that data down to something that is relevant to the case? A good eDiscovery platform will unify all the various types of digital documents on a person?s computer (e.g. Word documents, Excel spreadsheets, PDFs, etc) into something that is searchable. It then provides tools, like keyword searching, date filters and e-mail string condensers, that allow you to filter down to a likely subset of relevant. This can then more effectively be reviewed and prepared for production to the other side.

How tough is it to convince companies of the need for cybersecurity?

It?s tough for any company to properly see and assess risk unless they feel it. If you don?t feel it, there is so much competition for management?s time, money and energy within a corporation that often they?ll run forward with creating a social gaming network site, for example, and expanding it throughout the world without thinking how to deal with it if something happens in the U.S. Are they going to be compliant with local laws? Those questions don?t get asked near enough of people qualified to work across borders. That is experience I have gained over the years in the region and which can be leveraged as I team up with trusted experts I have worked with in the past.

As you put your team together, what sort of people are you looking for?

There are some good people out there with many of the essential skill sets mentioned above. I have found the most effective people are hungry for the truth (they kind of smell out when an answer given is not right and are willing to dig for the real answer) and are relentlessly focused on client-satisfaction.

When you are not working, how do you like to relax?

I play trombone in a funk band and am in an amateur jazz big band headed for Australia next week for the Manly Jazz Festival.? Otherwise, exercise and my 3 boys tend to keep me active on weekends.

Source: http://www.ecentral.jp/careercenter/2012/10/01/cybersecurity-is-big-business/

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