Talk to Dechert litigation partner Brenda Sharton, co-chair of the firm’s global privacy & cybersecurity practice, long enough and things are bound to get exponential. She and her team typically worked on two-to-three data breaches per week prior to having nine land on her desk from one Thursday to the next Tuesday during the early onset of the pandemic in Europe.

“When I picked my head up on Tuesday, I went ‘Oh my God, it’s COVID.’” said Sharton when we spoke by phone yesterday. “It dawned on me that this was what was going on. The hackers love a good crisis, and they like to take advantage of any disruption.”