TCNJ

24 The College of New Jersey Magazine dward McAndrew '92 has spent a career dealing with internet crime. After graduating from Trenton State College, he earned a law degree from Catholic University, made partner at the prestigious law firm Reed Smith, and then spent almost a decade as a federal crime prosecutor investigating hackers, data thieves, and child predators. Now back in private law practice — first at Ballard Spahr and most recently at DLA Piper — he's helped countless organizations, including major technology, entertainment, and financial services companies, deal with cyberattacks. The National Law Journal has named him a Cybersecurity and Data Privacy Trailblazer. We visited him in his Wilmington, Delaware office to talk about what he's learned from his work — and how we can protect ourselves. E You just started a new job with DLA Piper. What kind of work are you doing there? I'm continuing to work with victims of cybercrime. I help organizations — from small nonprofits to startups to multinational corporations — respond to cyberattacks: manage the crises, and interact with the FBI, the Department of Justice, and law enforcement agencies around the world to put out the fires. It seems that you started focusing on cybersecurity when you went to the Department of Justice in 2006. The Department of Justice was looking to hire lawyers with an interest in technology for the emerging area of cybercrime. The first real inkling of the "weaponization" of the internet was child pornography and the sexual exploitation of children. I got involved in the investigation and prosecution of those cases. We found a huge global community of child predators online, lurking in the seeming anonymity of the internet, able to communicate with victims from anywhere, creating and distributing images of child sexual abuse. And the proliferation of those images online caused ongoing injury and trauma to the victims — for them, the crime never stops. That was my first exposure to the dark side of the internet. Then we saw the cyberthreat just explode. All of a sudden, it wasn't just about exploiting children or stealing music on Napster. We started seeing people hacking into other people's computers, finding all sorts of information — from financial, health, and personal information to an individual's most intimate thoughts and activities. They were exploiting it, leveraging it to make money, to threaten individuals, to ruin their reputation. That's still happening as we speak, isn't it? It is. And two things have caused dramatic change along the way: We saw smartphones take off, and we saw social media start to flourish. Facebook is now the largest "country" on the planet. Billions of people are now online and they are sharing all sorts of information about themselves, who they associate with, what they do, where they are, what they like, what they don't like, what they buy. Companies started gobbling up all this data, analyzing it, figuring out how to monetize it. And criminals exploit this

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