A Minnesota cybersecurity and laptop forensics skilled whose testimony has featured in 1000’s of courtroom trials over the previous 30 years is going through questions on his credentials and an inquiry from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). Legal consultants say the inquiry may very well be grounds to reopen quite a lot of adjudicated circumstances wherein the skilled’s testimony might have been pivotal.
One may conclude from studying Mr. Lanterman’s LinkedIn profile that has a level from Harvard University.
Mark Lanterman is a former investigator for the U.S. Secret Service Electronics Crimes Task Force who based the Minneapolis consulting agency Computer Forensic Services (CFS). The CFS web site says Lanterman’s 30-year profession has seen him testify as an skilled in additional than 2,000 circumstances, with expertise in circumstances involving sexual harassment and office claims, theft of mental property and commerce secrets and techniques, white-collar crime, and sophistication motion lawsuits.
Or at the least it did till final month, when Lanterman’s profile and work historical past have been quietly faraway from the CFS web site. The elimination got here after Hennepin County Attorney’s Office stated it was notifying events to 10 pending circumstances that they have been unable to confirm Lanterman’s instructional and employment background. The county lawyer additionally stated the FBI is now investigating the allegations.
Those allegations have been raised by Sean Harrington, an lawyer and forensics examiner primarily based in Prescott, Wisconsin. Harrington alleged that Lanterman lied below oath in court docket on a number of events when he testified that he has a Bachelor of Science and a Master’s diploma in laptop science from the now-defunct Upsala College, and that he accomplished his postgraduate work in cybersecurity at Harvard University.
Harrington’s claims gained steam because of digging by the legislation agency Perkins Coie LLP, which is defending a case whereby a consumer’s laptop computer was forensically reviewed by Lanterman. On March 14, Perkins Coie attorneys requested the decide (PDF) to strike Lanterman’s testimony as a result of neither he nor they might substantiate claims about his instructional background.
Upsala College, situated in East Orange, N.J., operated for 102 years till it closed in 1995 after a interval of declining enrollment and monetary difficulties. Perkins Coie advised the court docket that they’d visited Felician University, which holds the transcripts for Upsala College in the course of the years Lanterman claimed to have earned undergraduate and graduate levels. The legislation agency stated Felician had no file of transcripts for Lanterman (PDF), and that his identify was absent from the entire Upsala College pupil yearbooks and graduation applications throughout that interval.
Reached for remark, Lanterman acknowledged he had no strategy to show he attended Upsala College, and that his “postgraduate work” at Harvard was in reality an eight-week on-line cybersecurity class referred to as HarvardX, which cautions that its certificates shouldn’t be thought-about equal to a Harvard diploma or a certificates earned by conventional, in-person applications at Harvard University.
Lanterman has testified that his first job after school was serving as a police officer in Springfield Township, Pennsylvania, though the Perkins Coie attorneys famous that this function was omitted from his resume. The attorneys stated once they tried to confirm Lanterman’s work historical past, “the police department responded with a story that would be almost impossible to believe if it was not corroborated by Lanterman’s own email communications.”
As recounted within the March 14 submitting, Lanterman was deposed on Feb. 11, and the next day he emailed the Springfield Township Police Department to see if he might have a peek at his previous personnel file. On Feb. 14, Lanterman visited the Springfield Township PD and requested to borrow his employment file. He advised the officer he spoke with on the telephone that he’d just lately been instructed to “get his affairs in order” after being recognized with a grave coronary heart situation, and that he needed his previous file to point out his household about his early profession.
According to Perkins Coie, Lanterman left the Springfield Township PD together with his personnel file, and has not returned it as promised.
“It is shocking that an expert from Minnesota would travel to suburban Philadelphia and abscond with his decades-old personnel file to obscure his background,” the legislation agency wrote. “That appears to be the worst and most egregious form of spoliation, and the deception alone is reason enough to exclude Lanterman and consider sanctions.”
Harrington initially contacted KrebsOnSecurity about his issues in late 2023, fuming after sitting by a convention speech wherein Lanterman shared paperwork from a ransomware sufferer and advised attendees it was as a result of they’d refused to rent his firm to carry out a forensic investigation on a current breach.
“He claims he was involved in the Martha Stewart investigation, the Bernie Madoff trial, Paul McCartney’s divorce, the Tom Petters investigation, the Denny Hecker investigation, and many others,” Harrington stated. “He claims to have been invited to speak to the Supreme Court, claims to train the ‘entire federal judiciary’ on cybersecurity annually, and is a faculty member of the United States Judicial Conference and the Judicial College — positions which he obtained, in part, on a house of fraudulent cards.”
In an interview this week, Harrington stated court docket paperwork reveal that at the least two of Lanterman’s earlier shoppers complained CFS had held their knowledge for ransom over billing disputes. In a declaration (PDF) dated August 2022, the co-founder of the legislation agency MoreLaw Minneapolis LLC stated she employed Lanterman in 2014 to look at a number of digital gadgets after studying that one in every of their paralegals had a legal fraud historical past.
But the legislation agency stated when it pushed again on a consulting invoice that was far greater than anticipated, Lanterman advised them CFS would “escalate” its assortment efforts in the event that they didn’t pay, together with “a claim and lien against the data which will result in a public auction of your data.”
“All of us were flabbergasted by Mr. Lanterman’s email,” wrote MoreLaw co-founder Kimberly Hanlon. “I had never heard of any legitimate forensic company threatening to ‘auction’ off an attorney’s data, particularly knowing that the data is comprised of confidential client data, much of which is sensitive in nature.”
In 2009, a Wisconsin-based manufacturing firm that had employed Lanterman for laptop forensics balked at paying an $86,000 bill from CFS, calling it “excessive and unsubstantiated.” The firm advised a Hennepin County court docket that on April 15, 2009, CFS carried out an public sale of its commerce secret info in violation of their confidentiality settlement.
“CFS noticed and conducted a Public Sale of electronic information that was entrusted to them pursuant to the terms of the engagement agreement,” the corporate wrote. “CFS submitted the highest bid at the Public Sale in the amount of $10,000.”
Lanterman briefly responded to an inventory of questions on his background (and up to date coronary heart prognosis) on March 24, saying he would ship detailed replies the next day. Those replies by no means materialized. Instead, Lanterman forwarded a current memo he wrote to the court docket that attacked Harrington and stated his accuser was solely making an attempt to take out a competitor. He has not responded to additional requests for remark.
“When I attended Upsala, I was a commuter student who lived with my grandparents in Morristown, New Jersey approximately 30 minutes away from Upsala College,” Lanterman defined to the decide (PDF) overseeing a separate ongoing case (PDF) wherein he has testified. “With limited resources, I did not participate in campus social events, nor did I attend graduation ceremonies. In 2023, I confirmed with Felician University — which maintains Upsala College’s records — that they could not locate my transcripts or diploma, a situation that they indicated was possibly due to unresolved money-related issues.”
Lanterman was ordered to seem in court docket on April 3 within the case defended by Perkins Coie, however he didn’t present up. Instead, he despatched a message to the decide withdrawing from the case.
“I am 60 years old,” Lanterman advised the decide. “I created my business from nothing. I am done dealing with the likes of individuals like Sean Harrington. And quite frankly, I have been planning at turning over my business to my children for years. That time has arrived.”
Lanterman’s letter leaves the impression that it was his resolution to retire. But based on an affidavit (PDF) filed in a Florida case on March 28, Mark Lanterman’s son Sean stated he’d made the troublesome resolution to ask his dad to step down given all of the detrimental media consideration.
Mark Rasch, a former federal cybercrime prosecutor who now serves as counsel to the New York cybersecurity intelligence agency Unit 221B, stated that if an skilled witness is discredited, any defendants who misplaced circumstances that have been strongly influenced by that skilled’s conclusions at trial might have grounds for enchantment.
Rasch stated legislation companies who suggest an skilled witness have an obligation in good religion to vet that skilled’s {qualifications}, realizing that these credentials shall be topic to cross-examination.
“Federal rules of civil procedure and evidence both require experts to list every case they have testified in as an expert for the past few years,” Rasch stated. “Part of that due diligence is pulling up the results of those cases and seeing what the nature of their testimony has been.”
Perhaps probably the most well-publicized case involving important forensic findings from Lanterman was the 2018 conviction of Stephen Allwine, who was discovered responsible of killing his spouse two years earlier after makes an attempt at hiring a hitman on the darkish web fell by. Allwine is serving a sentence of life in jail, and continues to take care of that he was framed, casting doubt on laptop forensic proof discovered on 64 digital gadgets taken from his house.
On March 24, Allwine petitioned a Minnesota court docket (PDF) to revisit his case, citing the accusations towards Lanterman and his function as a key witness for the prosecution.