Hi, I'm Ryan Levy.

Welcome to Cyber reasons Malicious Life. It was a faithful moment in the United States Court of Appeals for the 11th Circuit.

Dozens of people gathered in the old courthouse waiting for the arrival of the circuit judges and their impending decision on a certain case on a sunny summer day in 2018.

On one side of the courthouse stood the officials and lawyers of the Federal Trade Commission, the FTC,

a powerful United States government agency with more than 1,000 employees and an annual budget of $300 million.

On the other side stood one man, the owner of a failed business with few resources left.

An entire agency against one Michael Dorothy.

The issue at stake was momentous.

Could the FTC sue a company just because it was hacked.

In other words, is a cyber security failure a civil offense?

As the circuit judges read their decision aloud, many people in the courthouse gasped.

It was the eventful culmination of a long legal fight made of many twists and turns that began a decade earlier. So my name is Michael Doherty. I am the CEO of Lab MD, a now shell of a fully, formally fully functioning cancer

detection laboratory that was based in Atlanta, Georgia and Lab MD did prostate cancer analysis as well as any other type of

blood or urine type of analysis that would come into a urologist office. so PSAs, bladder cancer, you know, blood levels, kidney, all that.

I'm from Detroit, I have a degree in economics from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor,

and I got into medicine pretty quickly out of the

University of Michigan by working as a medical device salesman in surgery and then in

Lab MD started around 1996.

Michael started his company with a simple plan in mind,

utilizing then new technologies in order to streamline medical tests and provide better and more accurate results.

And we were really humming along and as private and no debt and about 26,000 square feet in Atlanta and about 40

employees at its peak with sales people around the country.

...