Crowell & Moring’s Alexander Urbelis Receives Luxury Law Award for Brand Protection

New York - September 22, 2021: Crowell & Moring senior counsel Alexander Urbelis received the 2021 Luxury Law Award for Brand Protection in the Service Provider category. The award ceremony was held in conjunction with the Luxury Law Summit Europe, attended by business leaders and leading counsel for the luxury sector. The awards recognize the skills that guide luxury businesses and brands to profitable success. The Service Provider category recognizes a product or service that is helping in-house legal teams deliver value to their clients.

Urbelis was honored for his work designing and engineering a brand protection and cybersecurity monitoring platform that scours the entire globe domain name system (DNS), identifying early stage indicators of cyberattacks, impersonation, counterfeiting, and other malicious activities. With clients in fashion, healthcare, sports, financial services, and critical infrastructure, in 2020 Urbelis was able to put his platform to work for the public good and made international headlines when he identified a live, state-sponsored hacking attempt on the World Health Organization. By February 2020, he realized that sophisticated cyberattacks relating to coronavirus would be forthcoming. Urbelis wanted to help clients and public-sector institutions stay ahead of these attacks. Using the DNS protection platform, he altered the algorithms in response to the pandemic, and began tracking early-stage indicators of cyberattacks and misinformation.

A senior counsel in the New York office and a member of the Privacy & Cybersecurity Group, Urbelis has more than 20 years of experience in the information security community and has varied experience as a Chief Information Security Officer, Chief Compliance Officer, in-house counsel, and private practice litigator. His unique skill set has allowed him to create a bridge between the technical and legal sides of cybersecurity. Through his monitoring and intelligence platform, Urbelis tracks sophisticated cyber adversaries and advanced persistent threats. He regularly advises on early-stage indicators of cybersecurity threats and provides counsel on both the legal actions and technical countermeasures required to neutralize those threats. In addition to advising clients on a wide range of data security and privacy matters,  Urbelis has assisted the world’s largest technology companies and non-profit organizations with Internet governance matters and the expansion of the global DNS.