Trick or treatise

As promised, I’m going to talk up a particular subject for this week’s Monitoring Matters, and we’re going to discuss lawsuits!

While I write this the witching hour has come to pass and Halloween has run its course for the year, although probably not all the sugar in some of your bloodstreams (shame on you, that was your child’s candy). October went out with a bang however, with a couple of really big announcements for the security industry over the course of the month. That said the news I want to discuss is about two different lawsuits.

Now, lawsuits aren’t necessarily the most newsworthy topic in the corporate world, that’s basically how two business talk to each other after all, but this is more about me being right about something. Making predictions, both informed and otherwise is sort of old hat for editorial columns, and I usually caution that my assertions should be taken with a grain of salt, because I’m basically usually wrong, and its fun guess at things. When it comes to the brouhaha around Vivint and their sale to NRG Energy though, my predictions have been uncanny.

Having just resolved another lawsuit where they paid plaintiff SkyBell Technologies $45.4 million I’m left wondering how much longer NRG is going to be on the hook for Vivint’s pre-buyout shenanigans. Their earnings call is tomorrow, and after taking very public criticism earlier this year I have to wonder what’s next. Do they double down? Will they cut their losses? I wouldn’t even bet money on the outcome, but I have suspicion that this circus isn’t over yet.

The other lawsuit we’re discussing this week is the one the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) is bringing against SolarWinds and its chief information security officer (CISO) Timothy G. Brown. I’ll let you read the finer points of the complaint for yourself, but this has been a topic we’ve regularly covered both in this blog and articles I’ve written over the past year. I think that wait-and-see attitude on whether the legal system would hold individual security personnel like CISO’s responsible for the crimes of their company has been spelled out with these charges. You’ll see many more lawsuits like this one in short order.

That’s a prediction I can comfortably make.