Recently, there has been an increase in data breaches throughout the retail industry after the development of “PoS RAM scrapers”. According to Nakedsecurity.sophos.com, a PoS RAM scraper is a way hackers can steal payment data from your PoS transactions. During the purchase process, the payment card industry has a set of data security standards called PCI-DSS. Your payment data is decrypted in the PoS RAM for processing, that is where the scraper software steals your data.

From the CLE class: Fashion Law Basics: The Lawyer Wears Prada

Patrick McKey
has a practice that concentrates primarily on complex commercial litigation and international business disputes, as well as corporate counseling. For over 10 years, he has represented a range of clients in the fashion industry, including Bruno Magli, Coach, Dana Davis, Giuseppe Zanotti, Harajuku Lovers, Italian Ready to Wear (“IRTW”), Kid Robot, L.A.M.B., Oilily and Vicini. He has represented many of these clients in all aspects of their operations, from intellectual property and licensing issues to commercial litigation, contract negotiations, and import/export issues.

Maria Vathis has a broad range of experience defending corporate clients in complex business litigation matters, insurance coverage, and class actions involving alleged violations of federal statutes, including the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. Ms. Vathis has represented financial institutions, investment firms, law firms, brokers, attorneys and other professionals. She handles matters nationwide in federal and state courts.

In this CLE class clip, Patrick and Maria discuss data breaches in the retail industry.

Watch the Full Fashion Law Basics: The Lawyer Wears Prada CLE Class

In California alone, the retail sector had the largest share of breaches, accounting for 25% of breaches and 42% of records breached in the past four years. Most retail breaches were caused by malware and hacking. The type of data most commonly breached was payment card data.

In 2013, Bryan Cave began studying data privacy and security. In 2016 data shows that security breach litigation is down overall. There was a 25% decline in the quantity of cases filed in the 15 month period, between October 2014 and the 2015 report.

Check out the complete CLE class video, presented by Maria Vathis and Patrick McKey discussing data breaches in the retail industry.