Ryan White

White is a trial and appellate partner who chairs Halpern May Ybarra Gelberg’s cybersecurity and data privacy department. He joined the firm in July 2020 after serving as chief of the cyber and intellectual property crimes section of the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Central District. There, he was among the federal prosecutors who sat on the computer hacking and intellectual property working group at the U.S. Department of Justice in Washington, D.C. He has a top secret/sensitive compartmented information security clearance.

“My intent is to work with companies to secure their data and to develop practices and policies that will help them avoid a data breach and to stay compliant with a patchwork of federal and state laws, including the California Consumer Privacy Act,” White said.

Of his work as a prosecutor, he added, “I loved that job, it was an excellent position.” He joined the office in 2011. He said he’d long been computer savvy and became fascinated by the field from the days in 2007 and 2008 when he clerked for Judge Kim McLain Wardlaw of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. “I worked on a Stored Communications Act matter in her chambers and it was fascinating to me.”

And as an extern for U.S. District Judge Dean D. Pregerson of Los Angeles, who is now a senior judge, White saw close up the early days of hacking when cases might involve a defendant who used a camcorder in a movie theater to bootleg copies of films.

He said sophisticated cybercrime as we have come to know it emerged into public awareness with North Korea’s 2014 hacker group attack on Sony Pictures and its release of confidential data from the studio. “What was considered a technical niche became a complex global area that caused us to marshal a lot of resources in response,” White said.

More recently, White led the two-year investigation and prosecution of the administrators of the massive darknet drug and hacking tools distribution and trading site known as Wall Street Market. The cross-border probe involved subjects and critical infrastructure in the Netherlands and Germany and collaboration among authorities there and in the U.S. to take the site down, arrest its operators and file criminal complaints. U.S. v. Lousee, 19-mj-01843 (C.D. Cal., filed May 1, 2019). The prosecution is pending.

Also on White’s list of successes is his investigation, prosecution and conviction of the conspirators behind the 2017 spearphishing campaign that penetrated the Los Angeles County Superior Court’s website and used employees’ accounts to commit a worldwide fraud and identity theft caper. White tried lead defendant Oriyomi Sadiq Aloba and obtained a 145-month prison sentence. U.S. v. Aloba, 18-cr-00083 (C.D. Cal., filed Feb. 16, 2018).

— John Roemer