Religious Institutions Update: November 2017

Nathan "Nate" A. Adams IV is a Partner in Holland & Knight's Tallahassee office

Kaylee A Cox is Associate in Holland & Knight's Washington D.C. office

Timely Topics

Serious data breaches have become routine in the United States, yet a recent survey shows that the majority of religious institutions do not have a full-time IT professional, have no system to detect a potential breach and do not even have a policy to mitigate the chances of a breach. Think it will not happen to your organization? So did the hundreds of businesses already impacted. Attacks on religious institutions in the past couple of years have involved theft of funds; "ransomware" attacks in which hackers freeze an organization's database until a fee is paid; appropriation of employee, member and donor information for sale on the dark web; and "hacktivist" attacks by groups that commandeer an organization's website to modify its message. The problem is only growing as most sensitive