On Tuesday, the SEC announced settled charges against four companies for “making materially misleading disclosures regarding cybersecurity risks and intrusions. The charges against the companies, Unisys Corp., Avaya Holdings Corp., Check Point Software Technologies Ltd and Mimecast Limited, all resulted from an investigation of companies “potentially impacted by the compromise of SolarWinds’ Orion software and by other related activity.” (See this PubCo post and this PubCo post.) According to law.com, the SEC “began issuing sweep letters to potential SolarWinds hack victims back in 2021.” The SEC charged that each of these companies learned that the “threat actor” that was probably the cause of the SolarWinds hack had “accessed their systems without authorization, but each negligently minimized its cybersecurity incident in its public disclosures.” In two instances, the companies were alleged to have framed their disclosures as hypothetical or generic risks. Unisys was also charged with a disclosure controls violation. According to Sanjay Wadhwa, Acting Director of the SEC’s Division of Enforcement, “[a]s today’s enforcement actions reflect,…
