Cyber Incidents and Response

Byrne Wallace Shields LLP is the leading Irish law firm for cyber breach response work. Our Cyber Incidents and Response team has unparalleled expertise in this area having acted in a leading role in the most serious cyber-attacks to have been perpetrated against Irish entities. Our team has and have been used extensively across the public and private sector for cyber breach response work including acting on the largest cyber incident in the State, in respect of a large-scale incident and data breach in the financial sector, and other private and public system attacks of significance. 

Cyber Incidents have become an inevitable operational risk for organisations across both the public and private sectors. In particular, ransomware attacks perpetrated by bad actors have the ability to cause immediate and severe disruption to critical systems, essential public services and infrastructure. They have the potential to undermine trust, expose organisations to damage and reputational risk and negatively impact customers and stakeholders. Advance planning combined with taking pro-active and immediate ownership of a developing cyber incident is essential. This ensures organisations can deal in real-time with the multiple issues that may arise. Adopting this approach will position an organisation in the best possible way to manage and resolve issues caused by the incident enabling minimalisation of reputational and financial fallout.

Through our engagement in large scale cyber incident response in both the public and private sector we have developed effective cyber incident response strategies and playbooks as well as innovative court-based remedies aimed to protect information subject to a data breach arising from a cyber-attack. In addition to this we have gained unique experience and insight into engagement with law enforcement and regulators such as An Garda Siochána, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the National Cyber Security Centre, the Central Bank of Ireland and the Data Protection Commissioner. 

To assist with preparing for and mitigating against cyber incidents our team provides training to organisations lead by Partner Jon Legorburu who is a leading expert in the area and who teaches at third level institutions on the subject.  

Our Services

Our team is uniquely placed to advise in respect of the following areas: 

• Ransomware response plans
• Extraction assessment response plans
• Regulatory strategy
• Media strategy
• Court applications
• Dark and deep web monitoring
• Worldwide information tracing
• AI document and information review programmes
• Bright web monitoring
• NIS2 compliant response
• DORA compliance
• NIS 2 legislative drafting
• Engagement with the state security apparatus where appropriate
• Defence litigation strategy
• Redress program assessments

Our Cyber Incident Response team is lead by Jon Legorburu and includes Sean O’Donnell (Data Protection), Valerie Hourigan, Laura Greene, Victor Timon and Robert McDermott.