Cybersecurity & Data Privacy

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WASHINGTON (March 25, 2025) – McCarter & English today announced that Erin Prest, former FBI Privacy & Civil Liberties Officer and Deputy General Counsel has joined the firm’s cybersecurity team as a partner in the firm’s Washington, DC office. Prest joins following an exemplary 18-year career at the FBI, where she oversaw the agency’s data security and privacy protection practices, its responses to breaches and cybersecurity events impacting FBI information, and provided guidance to FBI executives to protect the civil liberties of individuals under investigation. As Deputy General Counsel, she also oversaw the legal guidance related to criminal investigative activities, crisis response, procurement, criminal history information, and DNA matters among others.Continue Reading McCarter & English Welcomes Erin Prest Former Privacy & Civil Liberties Officer and Deputy General Counsel of FBI to Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Practice

Amid the chaos of the past few weeks—sweeping executive orders, relentless cost-cutting, and an air of uncertainty that lingers like smoke after a fire—federal contractors have been left reeling, straining to hear what comes next through the deafening noise. In this storm, predicting the future is as futile as fortune-telling. And yet beneath the shouts of change and upheaval, one truth remains, a whisper through the screams—some things, especially those that serve the government’s interests, are not going anywhere.Continue Reading Whisper Through the Screams: DOJ Commits to False Claims Act Enforcement in 2025

In Part I of this series we introduced readers to what Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) is understood to consist of under the CUI Program at 32 CFR pt. 2002, differentiating and safeguarding CUI, CUI Program Authority and Control, and CUI policy as promulgated under the U.S. Department of Defense CUI Program. (See 66 GC ¶…

The U.S. Department of Defense’s Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Program will become operational at some point in fiscal year 2025. In October, the DOD issued a Final Rule to address evolving cybersecurity requirements and cyber threats while defining the security controls that DOD intends defense contractors and subcontractors to implement. The program will require…

Over the course of the past few years, gallons of ink have been spilled addressing the seemingly ever-pending US Department of Defense’s (DoD) Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) Program. After keeping us waiting for years, it finally arrived when, on October 15, 2024, DoD published its Final Rule to establish the CMMC Program. See 89 Fed. Reg. 83092 (Oct. 15, 2024). Effective December 16, 2024, the Rule will require certain defense contractors to have implemented security measures to achieve a particular CMMC level necessary to safeguard Federal Contract Information (FCI) or Controlled Unclassified Information (CUI) as a condition of contract award. Codified at 34 C.F.R. Part 170, the CMMC Program will be augmented by a separate proposed acquisition rule to add a new 48 C.F.R. Part 204, amending the Defense Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) to address procurement considerations related to the CMMC Program, including allowing DoD to require a specific CMMC level in a solicitation or contract. See 89 Fed. Reg. 66327 (Aug. 15, 2024) or our analyses here and here. The date when that DFARS clause will become final is still unclear, but most suspect it will be soon.Continue Reading A Standard on Many Levels: A Look at CMMC 2.0 in Final

Sequels are rarely better than the films that precede them, and yet, sometimes a story is just too compelling to be limited to just one film. At the tail end of a summer full of Hollywood sequels, the Department of Defense (DoD) released a long-gestating sequel of its own. On August 15, 2024, DoD published a Proposed Rule that would revise the DoD Federal Acquisition Regulation Supplement (DFARS) to implement Cybersecurity Maturity Model Certification (CMMC) 2.0 into DoD contracts in the near(ish) future. This follows a December 2023 Proposed Rule, discussed here, establishing the CMMC 2.0 requirements in broad strokes. In this latest Proposed Rule, DoD proposes several changes to the DFARS that would do the following:Continue Reading CMMC and DFARS 252.204-7021—Is the Sequel Better than the Original?

Johnny, rosin up your bow and play your fiddle hard
’Cause Hell’s broke loose in Georgia and the Devil deals the cards
And if you win, you get this shiny fiddle made of gold
But if you lose the Devil gets your soul
~ The Charlie Daniels Band

Some might say there’s little difference between dealing with the devil and being a federal contractor. And for the unwary or unprepared, that may not be far off. Federal contracting comes with a litany of “fine print” that would make “Old Scratch” proud. However, as most savvy contractors recognize, it’s all hiding in plain sight, with the devil in the details. Take, for example, the cybersecurity requirements found in the Federal Acquisition Regulations (FAR) at 52.204-21 and the Department of Defense (DoD) FAR Supplement (DFARS) at 252.204-7012, -7019, and -7020. These requirements have been the topic of countless articles, trainings, webinars, whole conferences, etc., so it is surprising while simultaneously not surprising that they form the basis of a federal False Claims Act (FCA) claim the Department of Justice (DOJ) recently filed in its complaint in intervention.Continue Reading DOJ Went Down to Georgia: Lessons Learned from Recent Cybersecurity Enforcement Actions

The third revision of NIST Special Publication 800-171 brings substantial changes across several key areas: the structure of control families has been expanded to better address new threats, individual security controls have been updated to enhance overall system security, and the criteria for tailoring these controls to specific organizational needs have been clarified, all in…

On May 16, 2024, the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) adopted amendments to Regulation S-P to “modernize and enhance the rules that govern the treatment of consumers’ nonpublic personal information by certain financial institutions.”  Affected financial institutions have 18-24 months (depending on their size) to comply, and should begin preparing now.Continue Reading SEC Adopts Rule Amendments to Regulation S-P to Safeguard Customer Information and Enhance Cybersecurity Procedures at Financial Institutions